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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?

#731

Post by wreath »

ShredKazoo wrote: post #718
wreath wrote: 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. 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 perspectiv…

But why does representation of different skin colors matter or ethnicity matters? There are very very few occasions where it does, but in most everyday situations like work, sports etc it really doesn't. I'd rather be classified by an attribute that's relevant to the situation such as skill level or expertise rather than arbitrary attribute like my skin color, why not my height or color of my teeth instead?

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

#732

Post by eternalban »

JanisErdmanis wrote: post #721
eternalban wrote: post #650

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would love to read that paper but search is not turning up any papers with that title for me. What's the exact cite?

David Chaum, Torben Pryds Pedersen, Wallet Databases with Observers, 1993.

Thanks!

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

#733

Post by [deleted] »

layer8 wrote: post #315
analog31 wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I read the earliest articles on OO and SmallTalk in Byte Magazine, which IIRC would have been the early 80s. OOP was totally and utterly bewildering to me, a BASIC and Pascal programmer. It "clicked" much later, in two stages, using languages that were "kind of like" OOP, even if not rigorously so: LabVIEW, HyperCard, Visual Basic. I think VB had a decent strategy for introducing OO to the rest of us. Out of the box,…

> the first couple volumes of the Win32 programmer's manuals What books exactly are you referring to here?

[deleted]

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

#734

Post by 493579620678 »

DrewADesign wrote: post #654
ShredKazoo wrote: post #527

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>You might be well-intentioned and surrounded by people who you believe are well-intentioned, but not everyone is, and plenty of the people who talk and act as if they're well-intentioned will turn around and betray those purported intentions when you aren't paying attention. Yeah I totally buy that. >With regard to race-blindness in the 90s and 00s, consider that today's focus on race is a reaction to the willful ig…

> "talk about race less" (as a way to treat people more equally, and reduce discrimination) seems like a reasonable hypothesis to test. This was the status quo for a very long time. Mentioning people's race was like mentioning people's weight. It didn't work. > I'm also not convinced that what we're doing now is working better than what was done in the 90s and 00s. The 2005 study "Are Greg and Emily More Employable T…

What makes you think talking more about race works any better or should be considered to be "social progress" rather than the opposite? Would that study have better results if done today? I'm not American, but I don't see why you are so sure today's America is not closer to the Jim Crow Era than 2005 was.

I'm a black person who grew up in Sweden in the 00s and early 10s, and I'm very glad race was never relevant or talked about outside of social science class. Almost everyone at my school was white, and I never felt like I was different because of my skin color. The first person who ever told me that my race or skin color was relevant to anything was an American. The worst thing about American culture (and what keeps me from moving to the US even though I could make much more money there) is that so many Americans are insisting on considering race (and other arbitrary categorizations like ethnicity, sex and gender) to be such a large part of what makes a person, overshadowing that person's unique attributes and identity.

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

#735

Post by 493579620678 »

Dalewyn wrote: post #700
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,…

[flagged]

I agree, and I would extend that to sex and gender as well, and say that we should treat every person equally and according to their character.

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

#736

Post by kuschku »

satvikpendem wrote: post #584
kuschku wrote: post #577

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've automated the opposite: three unsolicited mails, and I automatically send the sender's entire company to spam and reply with a friendly request to stop. Three more, and I send an automated cease and desist, threatening legal action (with receipt confirmation requested). If it still continues after that, I actually involve lawyers. Most people are only willing to do something after repeated attempts because they'…

Good for you but you're such a vanishingly small part of the population that it won't stop anyone in sales and marketing from continuing to follow up on people (which, by the way, is not illegal). You effectively don't matter. And good follow up software will also stop once a reply has been sent from the recipient, which is then forwarded to a salesperson to triage.

> which, by the way, is not illegal

As business, sending automated messages to individuals without prior authorization is spam. Pre-checked tick boxes are not consent to receive such messages, you need explicit opt-in. If you are informed that these messages are unwanted, and told to stop, and yet you continue, it becomes explicitly and knowingly illegal.

> You effectively don't matter

As long as I cost them enough to make sure they'll never even think of contacting me again, I'm happy.

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

#737

Post by io84 »

satvikpendem wrote: post #584
kuschku wrote: post #577

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've automated the opposite: three unsolicited mails, and I automatically send the sender's entire company to spam and reply with a friendly request to stop. Three more, and I send an automated cease and desist, threatening legal action (with receipt confirmation requested). If it still continues after that, I actually involve lawyers. Most people are only willing to do something after repeated attempts because they'…

Good for you but you're such a vanishingly small part of the population that it won't stop anyone in sales and marketing from continuing to follow up on people (which, by the way, is not illegal). You effectively don't matter. And good follow up software will also stop once a reply has been sent from the recipient, which is then forwarded to a salesperson to triage.

From a typical starting pool of 100 leads, what percentage respond positively having received (up to) seven emails?

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

#738

Post by ricksunny »

jahnu wrote: post #372
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…

Regarding #3, the following David Graeber quote always stuck with me: “The ultimate, hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently.”

+1 for the Graeber quote. I wasn't familiar with it but makes sense he would have originated it. Dovetailing that with this Ask HN theme: When you realize that bog-standard consumer loan amortization formulae are arbitrary and not grounded in any fundamental reality more detailed than "the lender gets something in addition to the amount lent", it's eye-opening. I didn't really recognize that until after reading his Debt: The First 5000 Years (yes, I'm familiar with the statement flaws that others have commented before about his works), but set against alternatives I learned about in business school, like zero-coupon bonds (special to corporates, bondholders, and banks) it put the standard loan amortization schedule into context.

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

#739

Post by latexr »

therealdrag0 wrote: post #555
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'…

The vast majority of adults read almost 0 books. I think there’s some value in forcing classic cultural capital when we can even if it’s lost on some.

Maybe the vast majority of adults don’t read books because as kids they were forced to read “classic” works they didn’t identify with nor enjoy and have thus been conditioned to see books as boring and worthless.

Perhaps the solution is to not force specific books on anyone. If kids want to read Twilight for class, let them. Maybe it’s more important (and effective) to have them read anything and enjoy it than cramming “high literature” down their throats.

I posit that a person who enjoys the experience of reading a bad book is likely to later on pick up several good ones, while someone who was forced to read a handful of ostensibly good books they weren’t ready for is likely to never pick up a book again.

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

#740

Post by user_7832 »

btown wrote: post #671
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…

> Everyone is the main character in their own story For those with anxiety, one of the best pieces of advice I ever received (that also took me years to internalize!) was the corollary to this: nobody is thinking about you in a critical way, at the level that you are criticizing yourself, because they are their own main character. Which is incredibly freeing, because the anxious person’s assumption that one embarrass…

Thanks a lot for your comment! This part in particular

> the only person they are obsessing about is the main character to them, themself

seems obvious in retrospect.

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