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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?

#801

Post by berniedurfee »

_dain_ wrote: post #759
berniedurfee wrote: post #749

Leg drive when bench pressing. The idea that anything you could do with your legs could possibly help drive the bar upward was always ridiculous. Many, many years later, I finally found the right combination of articles and videos where it finally made total sense. Instant improvement and I wished I would have understood it sooner. The problem is really the name, which leads to a particular mental image, which is inc…

Do you have links to those articles/videos?

Here are a couple videos that provide most of the insight…

https://youtu.be/4T9UQ4FBVXI https://youtu.be/Bmjr4Q6je8I

Basically, you can’t bench with elbows straight out, because you’ll hurt your shoulders.

So you tuck your elbows a bit, but that means you’re fighting some leverage because the bar is no longer above your shoulders.

To fix this, you arch your back, which rolls your shoulders back and puts the bar back above your shoulders, but with your elbows still tucked.

One side of the arch, your shoulders, is pinned to the bench by the weight of the bar.

The other side of the arch, your butt, is not. So your arched back will straighten out under load, which rolls your shoulders forward, which moves the bar out of position.

So, to keep the arch solid, you use your legs to push your butt toward your shoulders, thus reinforcing the other side of the arch, keeping your shoulders rolled back.

So, leg drive is _not_ driving the bar, it’s driving your butt toward your shoulders, to keep the arch in your back solid, to keep your shoulders rolled back (and chest up) to keep the bar above your shoulders with your elbows tucked a bit, to keep from impinging a tendon.

You could bench with your butt off the bench and make a big arch, though this article explains you’re diminishing your returns by reducing range of motion.

https://startingstrength.com/training/keep-your-butt-on-the-...

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

#802

Post by therealdrag0 »

closeparen wrote: post #784
therealdrag0 wrote: post #774

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can still get code coverage points with broader tests. I think it’s reasonable to disavow expecting single unit tests for nearly every method on every class with mock/boilerplate/copy-paste hell. However, I would still expect “local integration” unit tests that exercise broader chunks of code and keep code coverage up. So it should be “I don’t need to write a new unit test for this because an existing unit test c…

Code coverage in Go is on a package level. A test that exercises a handler, controller, and repository can accrue coverage for at most one of them.

Huh. I guess I’ll add that to the list of reasons I don’t like Go.

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

#803

Post by kuschku »

satvikpendem wrote: post #783
kuschku wrote: post #736

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Correct, if you're following CANSPAM in the US you must abide by its rules in order to remain legal, however explicit opt-in is not required. What is required is: - No deceptive information - Valid physical address - Must have an easy way to unsubscribe, most often an unsubscribe link but asking the recipient to reply to stop being sent emails is also sufficient - Promptly honor unsubscribe requests within ten days O…

I'm in Germany, so far stricter rules apply. And often senders aren't even complying with the CANSPAM rules. Far too often have I received an email with sad gifs attached telling me they don't want to stop emailing me.

Recruiters, Sales, shitty spam farms, it's all the same.

My hometown already banned any kind of outdoor ads with lights and heavily regulated ad size, personally I'd appreciate if we banned advertising altogether as society.

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

#804

Post by minhmeoke »

itsmemattchung wrote: post #31

The power of an outline when writing. Over the past few years, I've been teaching myself how to write better. I'm not talking about elementary syntax or grammar. I'm not talking about writing the traditional, American English five paragraph essay. I'm talking about writing longer pieces of prose, articles or blog posts or short chapters with word counts ranging anywhere between 1500-3000 words. On this journey of imp…

It might also be a good idea to distill transient notes down into evergreen notes to refine and review knowledge: https://notes.andymatuschak.org/Evergreen_notes

This is a great way to refine your ideas before you write and makes it easier to develop the outline as an assembly of different notes that you already have.

An Executable Strategy for Writing: https://notes.andymatuschak.org/z3PBVkZ2SvsAgFXkjHsycBeyS6Cw...

The main insights for me were: - Using notes as a way to organize one's writing (by assembling ideas together into an outline, then filling out the details) to avoid writer's block. - Creating "logs" around concepts that extract useful ideas from ephemeral observations and distill concrete insights over time. - Using an "inbox" of new ideas as a way to focus attention and perform spaced repetition of concepts. - Organizing notes via tags, backlinks, and associations/outlines rather than as a hierarchy. - Incrementally iterating on atomic concept notes to form larger chunks in memory which allows thinking about more complex ideas and recognizing patterns.

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

#805

Post by lamontcg »

PUSH_AX wrote: post #711
lamontcg wrote: post #141

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?

To be more pedantically precise:

The big bang was not like a firecracker that went off in pre-existing, infinite flat space-time...

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

#806

Post by Viliam1234 »

gadders wrote: post #742
s5300 wrote: post #666

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure what fantasy you’re living in where a terrorist group (aside from perhaps the U.S. government) is “creating the modern world” lmao I presume whatever fantasy it is might be a fairly common “master race” one

The "they" when they say "they" created the modern world is not the membership of the organisation, but rather western civilisation/culture.

If it is silly to feel responsible for bad things that other people did, just because they happened to have the same color of skin, it is also silly to take credit for the good things other people did.

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

#807

Post by richardw »

sfink wrote: post #785
richardw wrote: post #188

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.

This one really struck me too. I think of it from the point of view of the emitter, which is surrounded by a sphere of every final destination of a photon in every direction, with no distance in between. The photon itself, from its own perspective, is born and immediately dies, having stepped across the 0-length gap between emitter and absorber.

And therefore the future affects the past. And light only ever gets emitted when there is a receiver to absorb it.

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

#808

Post by coffeebeqn »

DrJokepu wrote: post #649
coffeebeqn wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use the rule of threes to kill off any premature abstractions. ie. Don’t think you need to make this generic if you have one or two different variants of it. Most often it’s one- so it’s very easy to see that you’re just solving imaginary problems at this point. Each abstraction has a mental cost for reading and understanding the code so I try to be sparing. Too many code bases in my youth were a nightmare to navig…

That being said, sometimes a good abstraction can really simplify a complex problem by dividing it up to a set of smaller sub-problems. In such cases, the abstraction is worth it even if there is no reuse. As always, rules like this have to be interpreted in a context.

It’s certainly a rule of thumb, I also prefer to break things down but I try to use functions as the basic units as they’re the easiest to keep in your head when it’s clear what they do

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

#809

Post by mo_42 »

Bayesian probability or Bayesian thinking in general

Like many, I learned Bayes' theorem for an exam. I even did well. But it clicked only when I was reading The Scout Mindset (by Julia Galef). I cannot really tell why. I think it helped me connect math formalism with more real-world examples outside of statistics.

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

#810

Post by itsmemattchung »

minhmeoke wrote: post #804
itsmemattchung wrote: post #31

The power of an outline when writing. Over the past few years, I've been teaching myself how to write better. I'm not talking about elementary syntax or grammar. I'm not talking about writing the traditional, American English five paragraph essay. I'm talking about writing longer pieces of prose, articles or blog posts or short chapters with word counts ranging anywhere between 1500-3000 words. On this journey of imp…

It might also be a good idea to distill transient notes down into evergreen notes to refine and review knowledge: https://notes.andymatuschak.org/Evergreen_notes This is a great way to refine your ideas before you write and makes it easier to develop the outline as an assembly of different notes that you already have. An Executable Strategy for Writing: https://notes.andymatuschak.org/z3PBVkZ2SvsAgFXkjHsycBeyS6Cw...…

While I still do create "atomic notes" in my slip box and approach writing using a bottom up approach advocated by Zettelkaten professionals and enthusiasts, I no longer exclusively use this technique. I approach my writing not only bottom up, but top down. For me, the problem is—and has always been—with atomic notes is while its easy to create little, bite-sized notes, the problem (again: for me) that I accumulate a pile of notes, independent notes that have no connections to one another: no coherent web of thoughts.
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