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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?

#691

Post by rgrieselhuber »

metadat wrote: post #502
rgrieselhuber wrote: post #487

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A convenient stance, I suppose, when discussing what to do with “useless eaters.”

> “useless eaters.” Unfamiliar term. Turns out it is Nazi political slang. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/useless_eater

Yes, Harari echoes this term in some of his speeches, asking what to do with the “useless class of people” that emerge in the wake of the AI Revolution. Instead of asking whether we should be evaluating the materialistic “usefulness” of human beings in terms of the purely economic value they generate, or even whether we should be pursuing technologies that will create these conditions, he satisfies himself with questions about how to keep the “useless people” out of the way with drugs and the Metaverse.

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

#692

Post by hinkley »

ipnon wrote: post #560
whalesalad wrote: post #418

We are all just children. As kids we always want to be adults but then we become adults and ultimately everyone around us is just a child who’s been on the earth longer.

I will die knowing a little about programming computers and not much else. Over time this has slowly become acceptable to me.

You’ve still got time to learn a little bit about half a dozen things, if you’re so inclined.

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

#693

Post by flippinburgers »

pstuart wrote: post #669
flippinburgers wrote: post #450

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find the unatonable original sin spin placed on white people these days in the USA to be a tad bit repulsive personally.

To be clear, are you saying that white people are supposed to feel bad for being white because of "bad things" done by white people?

That is the underlying tone that comes across to me whenever these subjects come up. Effectively pushing against the idea makes one a "racist" or a "white supremacist" as far as I can tell. I don't know how to respond to that kind of labeling because I don't find myself disliking people because of something as superficial as their skin color.

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

#694

Post by hinkley »

rubberband wrote: post #346
I_complete_me wrote: post #337

Two are very pertinent for me at the moment: 1. The Monty Hall problem 2. The Wason Selection Task. I read about the first one eons ago and was impressed that Marilyn Von Savant was vindicated. Shoutout to her! The name Wason was unknown to me but I bought a book called The Oxford Companion to The Mind (new in 1987!) and his 'task' was featured in it (pg. 639 in my edition). I spent a lot of time satisfying myself as…

Oh thank goodness. Another human not cool enough to "get" the Monty Hall problem at first. I thought I was the only one... Took me years...

I made a pact with a group of friends never to bring up Monty Hall again, especially not when alcohol is involved.

The only things I’ve seen people get more upset about than MHP is infidelity and politics.

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

#695

Post by flippinburgers »

alphydan wrote: post #347
ShredKazoo wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a white guy, I'd certainly encourage you not to worry about this -- if we're talking about an upper middle class, professional-ish activity, you can be fairly sure that all those white people feel self-conscious about their group being so white and would welcome you to join them. Anyway, I'd be interested to hear more about the psychology of this. I remember when I was growing up in the 90s and 00s in California,…

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.

I have spent large parts of my life living with and interacting with people who are not my "skin color" so, yes, not a problem at all.

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

#696

Post by flippinburgers »

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 rather enjoyed wading through antiquated language in an attempt to understand. Honestly I don't recall if the prose in To Kill a Mockingbird was difficult to grasp and I suspect it wasn't but there were so many other books that we were "forced" to read that really were an enjoyable challenge. Shakespeare for instance.

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

#697

Post by catears »

arjvik wrote: post #129
catears wrote: post #99

I have one example and an anti-example. Both are related to algorithms and computer science. A) Packing a binary tree into an array. Anyone that has attended an algorithms course has likely created a binary tree with nodes, leaf nodes, left and right child etc. Seen the pine-tree like sketch with a larger example where each node except the leaf nodes have a left and right child. So how do you pack this tree into an a…

A) I've seen this before but I've never thought of the "index as a bit-sequence describing when in the tree a left vs. right path was taken" before! This is a very nice intuitive explanation that'll really help in describing this to others. B) Did you mean Floyd-Warshall's?

On B) yes, of course. Aaagh, all these algorithms and their indistinguishable names!

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

#698

Post by ngalaiko »

satvikpendem wrote: post #421
ngalaiko wrote: post #174

for me it was functional programming. and not just fp as is, but it's relation to another popular concept - oop. i was properly introduced only to oop, and grasped a little of fp here and there, especially learning go and javascript. what i consider a 'click' for me is when i realised that all of these paradigms are interchangeable. like, an abstract method is just a function, or a function signature is the same as i…

You should learn Haskell, that's what I'm doing now, in order to learn functional programming from the ground up. Languages like JS which have FP concepts aren't really functional programming fully.

i don't care about idealistic concepts

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

#699

Post by rgrieselhuber »

gnat wrote: post #516
rgrieselhuber wrote: post #487

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A convenient stance, I suppose, when discussing what to do with “useless eaters.”

Convenience isn't the point. The rules of society, laws, morality, ethics, compassion as a virtue ... they don't exist as physical laws. They're human constructs, and humans can (and do) choose to ignore them. It's an important growth moment to realise that the consequences of violating those "laws" are not delivered by the laws of nature but instead by the behaviour of humans. So you can be rude or arrogant, and the…

I understand the argument you’re putting forth, I just view it as the equivalent of the argument made by the Nihilist Germans in The Big Lebowski. It ends in will to power.

Within the constraints of the materialistic assumptions underlying it, I do agree that the ideals of compassion and empathy are examples of best-case behavior but the humans who rise to the top in such systems are usually not encumbered with the capacity for either. They would push back on the constraints of such “objective ideals” anyway because they see no coherent place for them in will to power systems.

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

#700

Post by Dalewyn »

ShredKazoo wrote: post #305
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.

As a white guy, I'd certainly encourage you not to worry about this -- if we're talking about an upper middle class, professional-ish activity, you can be fairly sure that all those white people feel self-conscious about their group being so white and would welcome you to join them. Anyway, I'd be interested to hear more about the psychology of this. I remember when I was growing up in the 90s and 00s in California,…

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