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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?

#561

Post by liketochill »

peterfirefly wrote: post #378
JanisErdmanis wrote: post #242

Superconductivity. I did four PhD projects regarding superconductivity properties at nanoscale without really getting hold on the concept. For instance, how zero resistance is related to cooper pair tunnelling and BdG Hamiltonian. Only when I was forced to write introduction a month before my thesis submission I gave my best last try for the farewell and it clicked. Note the title of my thesis “Quantum effects of sup…

Old papers are great. I have often deliberately sought out old papers to get a quick and good introduction to a subject. It doesn't always work -- sometimes a newer paper with better abstractions/examples/terminology wins, of course. I no longer know when I figured out this trick, but I have been using it for at least twenty years. I wish I had known about it earlier.

I have also found old papers to be the best for learning a new concept - they make it as simple as it can be. A colleague of mine wrote a paper that proves that negative numbers exist and would often cite archimedes, Galileo, newton, etc in his bibliographies. I think he loved crediting the first person to come up with whatever idea or concept he was using.

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

#562

Post by PaulStatezny »

czx4f4bd wrote: post #243
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 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…

> 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...

As a counter-point, OOP isn't necessary for dynamic dispatch.

None of these dynamic features you describe are necessarily any harder in non-OOP languages — or easier in OOP languages.

You can do the same kind of dynamic dispatch in Elixir, Go, etc.

OOP really is a preference, not a differentiator.

Source: I cut my teeth on OOP and used it for many years. Been using Elixir for the last half a decade, and have zero loss of ability to do things like this.

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

#563

Post by cddotdotslash »

satvikpendem wrote: post #399
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…

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.

I block people on LinkedIn or report them as spam on Gmail if I get more than 3 unsolicited messages. 7 just feels borderline ridiculous.

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

#564

Post by jasonwatkinspdx »

quacked wrote: post #456
jasonwatkinspdx wrote: post #451

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Obviously I understand my childhood community in far more detail and depth than your rather transparent question. My conclusions of their racism are based on far more than I mention, but yes, it has since then proven to be a very clear smoke signal. Other places I've seen the same thing but not as severely are snow sports and auto racing. I have no desire to retread the 101 of how "white" cannot be treated as logical…

[flagged]

I answered you clearly. Ethnic homogeneity is a smoke signal. Ethnic whiteness is exceptional.

You're past my line with ascribing what I think and who from in a way that's literally just you ranting your imagination at me. You have no idea my mind on any of these things based on our conversation thus far.

Talk about the self report...

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

#565

Post by tra3 »

Izkata wrote: post #536
tra3 wrote: post #466

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would you unit test that?

This was in django, where a good such test would set up the database, call the function, then check that the new state in the database is as expected. (Which IIRC is what I changed it to)

I've seen tests like that ("has the mock been called")... and in general I've felt that they were kinda useless.

Thinking about the original TDD approach -- red, green, repeat maybe it's not that bad? I prefer your approach, where you actually verify the state change. But in the absence of that, I wouldn't mind the "call the mock" approach. At least it does change some of the contract?

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

#566

Post by satvikpendem »

cddotdotslash wrote: post #563
satvikpendem wrote: post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I block people on LinkedIn or report them as spam on Gmail if I get more than 3 unsolicited messages. 7 just feels borderline ridiculous.

You (and many technical people) do, but most people don't, that's why it works. Reminds me of this comment I saw a while ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25825917#25828439

> On HN, people hate cold emails. In real life, I've found that most people will respond or ignore. Like a tiny minority will act like you killed their mother, but that's life.

> I know you know this, if you're in sales, but I, like many other engineers who read this forum was overly cautious when I first started speaking to people because I anticipated that 99/100 would be upset at having to talk to me.

> The truth was that 99/100 were willing to speak to me and listening to HN and Reddit set me back farther than I expected until I unlearned that lesson.

> So I'm saying this for the benefit of all those other engineers like me.

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

#567

Post by marcosdumay »

fritzo wrote: post #526
a_c wrote: post #424

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…

Yes, that resonates. But how do people change? Through their own rude awakenings? When they contrast their own selected peer group with other teams?

People change due to their own concepts that take a while to click.

You can have an impact there. But you can't cause immediate change.

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

#568

Post by zeroonetwothree »

bee_rider wrote: post #539
jdkoeck wrote: post #442

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ll bet this does not replicate, the effect of stereotype threat is notoriously overvalued. Don’t fall for junk science.

While we shouldn’t fall for junk science, we also shouldn’t fall for cynicism as an excuse to stick to our priors. It might not replicate if you try to do so, but until someone does, we shouldn’t write it off.

Surely the burden of proof should be on the side making the claim?

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

#569

Post by zztop44 »

crackercrews wrote: post #417
alphydan wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The better question to ask yourself (you the white guy), is would you join a group [insert som hobby like hiking] composed 100% of Cholitas. If yes, are you sure? if not, why not? *Not singling out Cholitas, but it's a group that may feel "other" to you.

If I lived in a majority-Cholita area, I would not give it a second thought. If I lived in an area with not many Cholitas, I would wonder if there was a reason the group had only Cholitas.

Really? I live in Japan but am not Japanese. I speak Japanese and have many Japanese friends. I’d feel quite different about joining a hiking group that was 100% Japanese as opposed to one that had a mix of Japanese and non-Japanese people.

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

#570

Post by bee_rider »

therealdrag0 wrote: post #557
lumb63 wrote: post #510

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not only this, but also the impact having to read something has on enjoyment. There are books like To Kill A Mockingbird that I didn’t care for in high school simply because I had to read it. When I revisited it years later of my own volition, I enjoyed it greatly.

So? Many others do enjoy reading even if for school. Should we stop teaching math cuz kids don’t like it in the hopes they’ll teach themselves as adults? School will never be all things to all kids.

I think their comment was, if anything, an hint to check out some of those classics again, even if you didn’t enjoy them when you were made to read them in school.
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