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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?

#631

Post by Aeolun »

lumb63 wrote: post #510
satvikpendem wrote: post #398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Regarding literature, I'll give an opposite opinion. Being forced to read the classics in school led me to not caring about them at all because I just couldn't relate at all, I had not had the requisite life experience for them to make an impact on me. Now, being an adult and having the life experience, reading them again makes me think more deeply and I can actually relate. So I think in school, we actually shouldn'…

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.

I don’t think this is always true. I enjoyed reading before school forced me to, and while I mildly resented being forced to read something I didn’t particularly want to read, it never made me enjoy reading less.

I also read a few books I otherwise would’ve never picked up that ended up very interesting.

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

#632

Post by BirAdam »

superorganism wrote: post #617
BirAdam wrote: post #614

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This was my personal big breakthrough. I realized that humans deal with abstractions of things and not things themselves. Accordingly, most of what humans argue about isn’t even real, but rather only what is perceived through layer upon layer of abstraction.

I've had this revelation too but wouldn't describe it as a big breakthrough though sometimes it feels like it should matter more. Can I ask how you feel like this affects your day to day life?

It allows me to turn the volume down on things. So many things actually matter very little. Also, it allowed me to see things a bit more clearly. For example, all forms of categorization and measurement are somewhat arbitrary (no matter how useful). Another one I got from this is that meaning is assigned and not found as it exists only in the mind. Or, another favorite of mine, concepts don’t really exist. Like meaning or measurement, they are useful but not real.

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

#633

Post by stemlord »

superorganism wrote: post #617
BirAdam wrote: post #614

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This was my personal big breakthrough. I realized that humans deal with abstractions of things and not things themselves. Accordingly, most of what humans argue about isn’t even real, but rather only what is perceived through layer upon layer of abstraction.

I've had this revelation too but wouldn't describe it as a big breakthrough though sometimes it feels like it should matter more. Can I ask how you feel like this affects your day to day life?

For me the most concrete practical use of this kind of thinking is achieving "mind over matter" when dealing with physical pain. It seems to ease the emotional impact if you focus on the physical sensation of pain itself rather than the idea of pain, which carries so much more baggage that adds an extra dimension to the suffering that becomes counterproductive in non-survival scenarios like lifting heavy weight at the gym.

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

#634

Post by codemonkey-zeta »

grogenaut wrote: post #124
closeparen wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seven years into my career I'm increasingly convinced that the emperor has no clothes with respect to unit tests that are just transcripts of the code under test with "mock.EXPECT()" prepended to everything - 95% by volume of the unit test code I've ever read, written, or maintained.

I call those lockdown tests and they're a smell. You don't want to dictate the implementation, just the inputs and outputs. The former leads to very brittle code, the latter describes and validates the contract. It's also important where you put the logic of the test in the code base when you have multiple layers. This latter part is harder and system dependent. In many cases mocks are now over used where previously…

> You don't want to dictate the implementation, just the inputs and outputs

When programmers really embrace dependency injection like the parent comment, the implementation largely is the inputs, and your code expects them all to be implemented correctly (or mocked correctly by test code). I completely agree that mocks are overused, and their importance in 2008 were in my view a direct result of the popularity of dependency injection patterns.

Following that logic, the best way to remove mocks from your tests is to minimize dependency injection, relegating it all to a single place in the code wherever possible, and implementing all other domain logic as pure functions of input to output. How to test that code which touches other systems? Integration tests (or multi-system tests or whatever you like to call them).

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

#636

Post by bongobingo1 »

eckza wrote: post #212
theptip wrote: post #189

Domain Driven Design. The book by Eric Evans lays out a bunch of concepts and as a developer that had not owned the architecture of a big domain, it was hard for me to see exactly where they fit. But after reading the book a couple times, and then encountering a few tricky domain modeling challenges, I started to see where these patterns add value. Also, as I started trying to describe the cohesive domain architectur…

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…

Is Wlaschins still reasonable (readable?) if you're not an F# developer (yet?) - but are familiar with FP generally?

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

#637

Post by [deleted] »

__turbobrew__ wrote: post #504
nivethan wrote: post #226

Earlier 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.

Are you willing to give some examples? I’m curious in what contexts people feel this way.

[deleted]

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

#638

Post by H8crilA »

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…

Reminds me of "managing unmotivated people is hard, so don't".

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

#639

Post by ClumsyPilot »

vidanay wrote: post #316
fortituded0002 wrote: post #196

1. 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…

#3 really hits home when you realize we have rules for killing each other (war). And we have separate legal trials to determine if someone broke those rules while trying to kill someone else. The penalty for breaking the rules about killing someone often is to be killed.

> 3 really hits home when you realize we have rules for killing each other (war

Those are some of the oldest and most important ones

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

#640

Post by bee_rider »

solveit wrote: post #626
bee_rider wrote: post #583

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve in general grown somewhat averse to the “burden of proof points in some direction” line of thinking. They are both making claims. (And I think usually most people are making some sort of claim, unless they are just nitpicking). One is claiming that they remember a study — pretty vague, and easily proven (as far as we can tell at least) by just showing us any study. The other is claiming that that study doesn’t r…

Most studies in this reference class (social science) don't replicate, so I'm fine with that being the default assumption.

It is hard to speculate without knowing much about the original poster or the types of studies they read. Maybe they prefer “Nature Human Behavior,” who knows?
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