A bon mot I saw on a sign outside a liquor store: When I was young I thought a $1000 was a lot of money. Now I’m older I realize that $1000 is a great deal of money indeed.
Ask HN: Concepts that clicked only years after you first encountered them?
541–550 of 946 posts
Re: Ask HN: Concepts that clicked only years after you first encountered them?
#542This might be a good thread to ask this. I have done all the math in college, but I don't fundamentally understand sine, cosine, tangents, and logs. For sine, cosine, and tangents, I understand how they may correlate on a graph, but that doesn't really give me additional insight into how to apply or use any of this. Similar thoughts on logs, especially when it comes down to O(logn). Maybe someone can direct me to a v…
Consider following John von Neumann's advice "in mathematics you don't understand things. You just get used to them." Write down the first 100 equations involving sin, cos, tan, log. Use those equations in 100 larger derivations. Visualize the functions in 100 different ways (2D, 3D, animated).
It's a lot of memorization and "getting used to" the math, punctuated by a few "aha moments" of insight when you realize the 100 examples can be compressed into say only 50 examples. In retrospect its tempting to think the insights led to understanding, but really they were just the dopamine hits on top of the real stuff of understanding: tedious acclimation to a new abstract realm.
Re: Ask HN: Concepts that clicked only years after you first encountered them?
#543Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
read it again, its not about getting hired, its about getting capital and decision making roles that skip the corporate ladder. these have an overrepresentation of Ivy League MBAs in them with a pedigree that has nothing to do with promotions. People see the Ivy League MBA as key to this and aren’t interested in the other things an MBA can do. The jobs these disillusioned alumni have were attainable without the MBA.
There are very typical archetypes that benefit from top MBAs and if your background isn’t one of those, then it won’t help. For example I doubt an associate (who is black) at a major IB firm gets much worse outcomes from an Ivy League MBA than their white peers. If black people are over represented in the people who are admitted but not from those backgrounds that stand to most benefit, it would stand to reason their outcomes would be on average worse. But that doesn’t mean taking an arbitrary white MBA grad and making them black would make their outcomes much worse
Re: Ask HN: Concepts that clicked only years after you first encountered them?
#544Earlier quoted context omitted.
because they didn't need the MBA for the roles they did land its all part of one contiguous complete thought
You also say: > the connections resulted in no improved professional access or ability to exchange time for food and shelter. When you make such broad statements, then walk them back in comments downstream, it makes conversation unfruitful.
you’re unwilling to view it as a coherent and related thought
“improved” is the operative word that you seem to ignore or view as contradictory
the MBA did not improve their work prospects, they already had work prospects. you asked for a clarification, you call the clarification backtracking
do you have an actual opinion on the topic now that its more clear for you
Re: Ask HN: Concepts that clicked only years after you first encountered them?
#545For me it was design patterns. I read the book in the late 90s. I was working mostly on Mac development using PowerPlant. But despite the fact that it used several of the design patterns described in the Gang of Four book, many of them still didn’t seem very clear to me. Then when MacOS became OS X, and I started using Cocoa, it just clicked. Having delegates finally made sense, for example. Previously, it was so abstract, but once I saw it in action within Cocoa, it made a lot more sense for some reason.
Re: Ask HN: Concepts that clicked only years after you first encountered them?
#546Earlier quoted context omitted.
That video did the same for me. I also like the reducible video for Fast Fourier Transforms as well as the Veratasium piece that shares some fun history. Reducible - FFTs the most ingenious algorithm ever https://youtu.be/h7apO7q16V0 Veritasium - The Most Important Algorithm of All Time https://youtu.be/nmgFG7PUHfo
The FFT is something I still can't quite grok, for some reason.
I had the same problem. Then I took a math course where we covered the general fourier transform and it made way more sense. An the FFT is the result of a simplifying transformation based on discrete regularly spaced points and that's really opaque from the other side.
Re: Ask HN: Concepts that clicked only years after you first encountered them?
#5471. Functional programing
It took me a while, but once it clicked, everything changed. Programming became a process of data consumption, transformation and then presentation. It was if/then/loops/classes/libraries/languages before that.
2. Entropy
The example of the messy room that gets messier with time is probably the worst. Entropy is everywhere (in real life or in IT); and it’s actually the reverse of that example. For me now, entropy is life.
3. Bitcoin
I was quite a crypto/bitcoin skeptic back until 2014-2015. The whole thing seemed like a ponzi/pump&dumb scheme. Until I read the book “Mastering Bitcoin”. It goes into the details of how Bitcoin works. That’s when Bitcoin (as a cool technology) clicked to me. I still see the trading activity as suspicious but I made my peace with it as humans doing what humans always do: speculation.
Re: Ask HN: Concepts that clicked only years after you first encountered them?
#548The 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…
Agreed. When I was doing sales, I would follow up with people seven times before they replied. I used to feel bad until I realized that it worked, then I just automated that part and didn't think about it further, the leads once they replied were sent to my CRM where I could then set them up on a call or some other action.
This comment makes my LinkedIn make a lot more sense
Re: Ask HN: Concepts that clicked only years after you first encountered them?
#549it was very hard for me to understand what was the point of classes when I opened my first C++ book when I was.. 11/12?
thankfully it became very clear as soon as I started having actual projects and noticing all the C apis I was writing would all look like
foo* foo_create();
void foo_destroy(foo*);
void foo_set_stuff(foo*, int);
void foo_bloberize(foo*);Re: Ask HN: Concepts that clicked only years after you first encountered them?
#550Narcissism. My grandmother was a terrible narcissist. I loved her dearly and she had a lot of wonderful qualities, but The quality that stood out the most, sadly, was narcissism. My mother was also a narcissist to a somewhat lesser degree. It didn't occur to me that I too was a narcissist until I was about 35 years old. It took waking up in the corner of the living room in my friends one bedroom apartment Early one m…
I find it interesting when people come from a long family line of narcissists (not uncommon) that they often attribute it to a cycle of being raised by a narcissist making you into a narcissist.
it seems more likely that there is a genetic/biological basis for this personality trait