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

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711–720 of 946 posts

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

#711

Big bang didn't happen in a single point in our space-time like a firecracker, it happened everywhere and was just a uniformly much hotter and denser universe that didn't really explode into anything, but space-time just expanded to make the universe less dense.

If “everywhere” is an infinitesimal point, is there much difference?

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

#712
post #683

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was going to put this as mine. It’s astounding how important this is. I woke up at 2am with the intuition that light was like a lightning strike across spacetime, with no time and no distance between the emitter and absorber. Why and how, though. What are the fully-baked implications.

Given that most physicists would tell you the same, I presuming you're not merely saying this is only of physical importance - Many spiritual teachings say that consciousness is made of light.

The mere physical implications are astounding but don’t seem to be fully embraced. A photon that left a billion years ago connects the source and destination. They’re basically touching each other. Shortest distance between entangled photons isn’t the 3D distance, it’s back via the source. Our perspective is that a photon takes a billion years but we need to see past it to what is instant, because it hints at deeper questions and answers.

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

#713

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'…

I think most educators and teachers know that students won't get the classics. The goal is to at least make the students comfortable with the difficult language of the classics, and make them realize that analysis of these books yields deep insights. If they instead taught students easier books in schools, student would never develop the reading skills to tackle the classics, and a much smaller percentage of adults w…

Man, my literature classes in high school were a complete joke. The "deep insights" were all just arbitrary memes that had little to no correlation with reality

Stuff like: "What was the meaning of the yellow curtains?"

They pretty much ruined my enjoyment of every book I had to read, even though I did and still do love reading. For books required by classes, I just read the cliff's notes.

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

#714

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 o…

That's good to know, thanks for the tip

Man oh man, it really disgusts me that people are so stupid though. They just let companies blast them with popups, e-mails, text messages, etc all day when it takes so little effort to cripple the spammers and cut them off completely.

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

#715

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't really understand OOP until you recognize it as one style among many that you may use in different parts of each program. Some parts are naturally OO-y, others DD-y, others declarative, often an unholy mix in each place. The problem dictates elements of the solution. Shoehorning a solution into a particular style makes a bad solution. Never forget who is in charge. Deferring to a style dodges responsibility…

DD?

Data-driven. What weather prediction, finite-element analysis, and current AI do.

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

#717

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…

> 1. Everyone is the main character in their own story.

Here is just one example of the total wrongness of something I tend to be automatically sure of: everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute centre of the universe; the realest, most vivid and important person in existence. We rarely think about this sort of natural, basic self-centredness because it’s so socially repulsive. But it’s pretty much the same for all of us. It is our default setting, hard-wired into our boards at birth. Think about it: there is no experience you have had that you are not the absolute centre of. The world as you experience it is there in front of YOU or behind YOU, to the left or right of YOU, on YOUR TV or YOUR monitor. And so on. Other people’s thoughts and feelings have to be communicated to you somehow, but your own are so immediate, urgent, real.

David Foster Wallace

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

#718
post #681

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,…

> 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. Although I appreciate the intentions of such people, as a non-white guy this always made me feel uncomfortable. That I'm not being wel…

Yeah that's definitely an understandable feeling. But on the other hand, if representation matters (as others in this thread claim), it seems hard to please everyone? Supposing you had a group that's 100% white by accident, and they know representation matters. Because they're 100% white, they're starting from a disadvantage: If you want representation, it helps to have representation already! So from this perspective, being 10% nicer to non-whites who join the group seems like a natural solution, to overcome the chicken-and-egg problem.

Maybe the right compromise is to just be especially careful not to be rude to people who are underrepresented in the group, and not worry about it beyond that?

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

#719
post #687
post #526

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

"Change" is manifestation of idea. If you have the idea that sleeping 8 hours a day is beneficial, you are very likely to act like it. Imo, ideas form within the spectrum of indoctrination and "epiphany". Indoctrination is something that you hear over and over, and sort of taking it as granted. Parent to children, school to students, religion to devotees, government to citizen, social media to general public, hackern…

There's a noticeable difference in my abilities at the start and end of the day.

At the start I have more processing power and short term memory grunt. At the end I have far more knowledge loaded into cache.

The first part of the ole sleep schedule is just plain getting enough REM.

The next level of coordination is scheduling your time to take advantage of the morning horsepower, and end of day creativity.

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

#720
Fractality of things is all around us. The whole world is inside you, but at the same time the same world contains all of us. Most simple things are fractal, and most complex things are made using this concept. It's very applicable to code as well. I kinda encountered this my whole life, but it started clicking only few years ago on the 5th year of spitting code out of my head
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