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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?

#471

Post by MichaelDickens »

What an algebra equation is. I could solve linear equations, quadratic equations, and systems of equations by adding/subtracting/multiplying/dividing both sides of the equation and by adding two equations together. But I didn't know why you were allowed to do any of those things, or what else might be allowed. Are you allowed to square both sides? Raise both sides to a power?

It wasn't until maybe my third year of algebra that I realized an equation means both sides of the equation are equal to each other, which means you can perform any operation at all to both sides, and the result will still be equal.

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

#472

Post by hnick »

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…

Perl's approach to OOP has flaws but it being generally "data structures you already know but with some magic and functions attached" helped me understand it on a more fundamental level. It greatly supports the mix-and-match approach you mention here.

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

#473

Post by jackcosgrove »

It's not really a discrete concept, but the course western philosophy took over the past 500 years, and its dialogue with science, was something that took me decades to appreciate. In college I sort of understood the outlines of this development, but years of learning, reflection, and life experience have really solidified it for me.

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

#474

Post by eckza »

cpeterso wrote: post #322
eckza wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a solid book. I was chugging through it a bit at a time, until I discovered Scott Wlaschin's Domain Driven Design Made Functional. I've dropped the Evans book (as it's mired in mid-00's Enterprise Java patterns) and am enjoying this one quite a bit more. Both books are great. Read whichever one aligns with your practice best. I recommend Wlaschin's book for anyone curious about FP, without hesitation. He's great…

Evan’s book is a bit of an academic slog, but I finally felt like I understood how object-oriented design should work. An easier introduction I recommend is InfoQ’s “Domain Driven Design Quickly”, available in print or a free PDF ebook: https://www.infoq.com/minibooks/domain-driven-design-quickly...

I have to agree!

I'm only about a third of the way through; I didn't realize that there was so much about properly building OO systems that I'd simply never seen in the wild, or heard of before.

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

#475

Post by zeroxp »

aj7 wrote: post #303
thyrox wrote: post #237

The power of follow ups (especially in sales) One thing which held me back for a very long time was not following up with people who didn't show much interest initially. I wasted so many good leads thinking it is impolite to follow up with people after contacting them once. My whole life changed once I understood the power of follow ups and understanding that most people are so busy that it takes at least 6 reminders…

You were not trained well. The principal element in sales is asking for the order. Everything, and I mean everything, follows from that. If you had been trained this way, following up would be second nature.

Some products dont fit well with a one call close and are centered around building long term relationships with your clients. This is especially true in b2b. Maybe you were trained too narrowly.

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

#476

Post by worldsayshi »

PartiallyTyped wrote: post #431
bcrosby95 wrote: post #293

Earlier 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…

> 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.

My guess is that it's due to how expectations affect how likely we are to enter flow state. If we subconsciously expect ourselves to enter a challenge in less than good/fair/even conditions we might be less likely to engage fully because we're using our attention for questioning ourselves/the situation.

At least that's how I feel I myself work.

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

#477

Post by jb3689 »

Mathematical proofs. I studied math in college and didn't really understand anything I was doing until well after school. When I read Book of Proof a few years later it all suddenly clicked for me and made perfect sense. Half of studying math is just surviving. Same thing for my Fourier analysis and signal processing classes. I didn't grok it until a few years after my classes. Don't even get me started on statistics which I still find difficult to really understand "why do I trust this magic formula?". The hard science behind statistics is actually incredibly complicated when you start to dig into it

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

#480

Post by kl4m »

khaledh wrote: post #140

YAGNI and KISS. When I was a junior developer I used to overthink and overdesign solutions, most of which was never needed. It took many years and a lot of battle scars to realize that less abstraction is more. Today I see a lot of juniors do the same mistake and I ask them to revise their designs to keep it simple.

My personal trick: as long as I'm confident that I will be able to refactor in the abstraction, I don't bother. I may or may not ever revisit that code.
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