1. Object-oriented programming. At that time, no one gave a clear explanation of what was actually meant by it and how to implement it. The various schools of OOP often did not acknowledge the existence of other (heretical) schools, which caused a lot of confusion in my brain. Critical voices were hounded and silenced. Also, the gap between implementation and theory was always quite wide. I did not know Smalltalk at that time and have not seen it in use to this day.
2. Electromagnetic fields. I'm still not sure I understand them. I found this video helpful: https://youtu.be/XoVW7CRR5JY
Ask HN: Concepts that clicked only years after you first encountered them?
591–600 of 946 posts
Re: Ask HN: Concepts that clicked only years after you first encountered them?
#592One of the big aha moments which clicked for me only fairly recently was staring at some physics equations my own internalized realization that light doesn't experience time and then I had to tell everyone haha - but that one eureka moment unlocked a whole lot of understanding and certainly a lot more questions. This of course was after all the schooling and physics where it somehow sailed over my head the whole time…
I'm not sure how this works out in media which slow down light https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherenkov_radiation There, e.g. gravitational waves will be at c (in a vacuum), but wouldn't photons experience time there? Edit: I suppose the photons are still actually moving at c
I had thought because light was absorbed and re-emitted but that and scattering ideas are incorrect. See this video for an explanation of why light travels slower through a medium with an index of refraction greater than one.
https://youtu.be/CUjt36SD3h8
Re: Ask HN: Concepts that clicked only years after you first encountered them?
#593Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sapiens by Harari covers this extensively. So much of human development is our ability to ascribe fictive boundaries and definitions to things. Rules, authorities, myths, money, culture, countries, companies. What are any of them? They're all made up. We could just stop believing in all of them tomorrow.
I often see Harari and Graeber's being discussed at the same time, and I am always surprised. Harari write pop sci, a grand narrative with many liberties with both history and science. Graeber's books are heavily referenced pieces of work. Debt: The first 5000 years ends at 73% on my Kindle, because the remaining 27% of the book (144/534 pages) is references and footnotes. Their books are not in the same intellectual…
The number of references are not an indication of the quality of a work. Adam Smith wrote a whole book on The Theory of Moral Sentiments but in Debt, Graeber invents Adam Smith's morality whole cloth.
I have no intention of reading Dawn of Everything but reviewers have noticed references that say the opposite of what the authors claim they say.
Re: Ask HN: Concepts that clicked only years after you first encountered them?
#594Learning history / literature in school is important. I was a total STEM math nerd in school. I used to frequently complain how I don't get what's the point of it, or how it's a waste of time and I'm learning nothing. I still think the emphasis of school was off, but I get the point of it now. Stories are like code for humans. You can't tell someone what it means to be good or bad, or to give them a course in philoso…
> Learning history / literature in school is important. Really depends on HOW you learn it IME. If it's just regurgitating dates/names/whatever it isn't helpful at all, at least for me. If you establish that event x led to y because of z, it just clicks and suddenly makes sense. For example, let's take hitlers rise to power: "He became the chancellor of germany in 1933" That is just about useless. "Hitler rose to pow…
This is true for literally everything you can possibly learn in school. You can learn math badly. You can learn physics badly. You can learn programming badly. You can learn personal finance badly. Professionals who work on history pedagogy work hard to prevent the sort of "memorize names and dates" approach. This shouldn't be considered a unique problem with history as a discipline.
Re: Ask HN: Concepts that clicked only years after you first encountered them?
#595Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’ll bet this does not replicate, the effect of stereotype threat is notoriously overvalued. Don’t fall for junk science.
Women that dedicate their careers to chess still dramatically underperform men at the professional level. There is even a different rating level and title system for women: women earning the "women grandmaster" title need 200 fewer ELO points than the grandmaster title for men. No woman has ever won the World Chess Championship, and there are far fewer female GMs than male GMs.
Some women (Polgar for example) have argued the separate womens' titles significantly contribute to the gap in skill.
Re: Ask HN: Concepts that clicked only years after you first encountered them?
#596Earlier quoted context omitted.
Women that dedicate their careers to chess still dramatically underperform men at the professional level. There is even a different rating level and title system for women: women earning the "women grandmaster" title need 200 fewer ELO points than the grandmaster title for men. No woman has ever won the World Chess Championship, and there are far fewer female GMs than male GMs.
How do women and men do versus AI opponents, i.e. without any gender? Wonder if chess.com has the data?
We all get slaughtered. It's possible Magnus could make one draw with white against a not-current Stockfish on limited depth out of a hundred games, but that would be about the best any of us could do.
Re: Ask HN: Concepts that clicked only years after you first encountered them?
#597Earlier quoted context omitted.
Amen. I have been frustrated at many jobs where developers were so proud of endlessly writing mocks and spending more time on their tests than on core functionality. Over time I have favored very basic unit tests and leaning in more on automated integration and regression tests. I know the theory of unit tests catching things earlier, I just don’t think it matters in practice.
I once saw type checking presented as kind of an alternative to unit tests which doesn't rely on the assumption that developers write good tests, and I really like that viewpoint. A powerful type system can prevent many bugs, doesn't need additional test code and doesn't make any assumptions. Of course it's not necessarily a full replacement, but it's definitely better and more time efficient than bad tests.
> Of course it's not necessarily a full replacement
I'd actually say: Not in the slightest. A type system just rules out illegal input values[0] but it won't ensure that your business logic is correct.
And even that[0] is not entirely correct because, most of the time, a type system just rules out some illegal values but not all of them, because it cannot represent all possible constraints. Gary Bernhardt discussed this whole type checking vs. tests debate at length here: https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/ideology
Re: Ask HN: Concepts that clicked only years after you first encountered them?
#598I read “Deep Survival” a few years ago pre-pandemic and was pleasantly surprised it wasn’t a book of survival stories. The main takeaway for me was that sure, nature doesn’t care if you live or die, yet surviving in modern life is an illusion - a papering over of the brutal, unfeeling and inescapable “nature.”
The author wrote of survivors coming home after a harrowing near-death experience and realizing that survival is one day at a time, even in the comfort of your own home. Once you taste true survival it may haunt you. Survival is an easy concept with subtle and deep physical and mental consequences.
Kind of reminds me of David Foster Wallace’s “This is water” - https://youtu.be/eC7xzavzEKY
Re: Ask HN: Concepts that clicked only years after you first encountered them?
#599Learning history / literature in school is important. I was a total STEM math nerd in school. I used to frequently complain how I don't get what's the point of it, or how it's a waste of time and I'm learning nothing. I still think the emphasis of school was off, but I get the point of it now. Stories are like code for humans. You can't tell someone what it means to be good or bad, or to give them a course in philoso…
I think people come out of school hating reading because nobody likes being forced to read specific books, as everyone's tastes are different. It sounds like this might have been what happened to you.
And exams.
Learning is one thing, being tested on facts and trivia is totally something else.
Re: Ask HN: Concepts that clicked only years after you first encountered them?
#600What 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 al…
It was long after I graduated and passed symbolic logic that I realized a proof is the “solution” of an equation using logical operators instead of algebraic ones. Proof writing then becomes following branches on the tree of textbook knowledge to new leaves. I envy those who grok this when they’re kids.
Can you elaborate more on this?