Live data from Hacker News

How to build quickly

learnhowtolearn.org

141–147 of 147 posts

Re: How to build quickly

#141

I've been diving into the science of learning, and the blog author clearly knows their stuff. For those intrigued by this field, here are some fascinating concepts worth exploring: Bloom's Taxonomy (absolute game-changer), Inquiry-Based Learning, Deep Cognitive Processing & Higher-Order Thinking (closely tied to Bloom's Taxonomy), Generation Effect & Testing Effect, Deliberate Practice, Interleaving, Metacognition, C…

Given the disaster that can be both google and llm, do you have any specific pieces of writing you found particularly high quality?

I like the channel by Benjamin Keep https://www.youtube.com/@benjaminkeep

Re: How to build quickly

#142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. Ideally a codebase is just a monorepo of pure functions and apps are simply the control flow that weaves them. Write reusable libraries not microservices (silos). Sadly incentives are not aligned for this at scale - easier to buy cloud SaaS n+1 whose sales team insist "this $badware solves a Hard Problem" while your devs sit in ceremonies all day.

That's why Paul Graham started Y Combinator and handed the entrepreneurial reins to the developers instead of the project managers and MBAs and made billions in the process.

maybe that was true once, as I understand it current YC is just a finishing school for t1 grads to pad the CV between graduation and working as a "thought leader" (lol)

Re: How to build quickly

#144
I do this for writing, whether it's a book, an article or a D&D campaign. For me it's not about speed at all, it's the natural way my mind works and if I try to do this linear, line by line, I face blockades soon in the process.

Re: How to build quickly

#145
post #29

This is how I work on my projects as an indie dev. When I start working on something significant (a new feature, for instance), I'll create a markdown file that has a summary of what I'm trying to achieve and then a TODOs section which turns into this massive outline of all the tasks that I'll need to do to complete the work. At first, the outline just has a few tasks that are fairly high-level, but as I dive into ea…

What in the world... are you me?

Re: How to build quickly

#146
post #96

This reads like a strategy for creating filler content. If you have to write a school essay an outline helps you churn through all the BS. By contrast, when you try to write something meaningful almost all effort goes into two things (a) figuring out what you actually have to say and (b) finding the right words to express it. School essays are written by people who don't have anything to say. Intro fluff. Chapter one…

It's interesting that you use Paul Graham as an example. Another comment in this thread shows him using the outline technique for one of his essays: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41149003

Yes, he didn't come up with the ideas from scratch as he was writing them. It took years to gain the experience and expertise. Yet he still saw the value in outlining when the time came to write it down.

> Filling out an outline like this produces an uninspired, boring, formulaic trash

So write a better outline. George R. R. Martin and Agatha Christie both used extensive notes and outlines as part of their writing process.

> She made endless notes in dozens of notebooks, jotting down erratic ideas and potential plots and characters as they came to her “I usually have about half a dozen (notebooks) on hand and I used to make notes in them of ideas that struck me, or about some poison or drug, or a clever little bit of swindling that I had read about in the paper”.

> She spent the majority of time with each book working out all the plot details and clues in her head or her notebooks before she actually started writing.

https://www.agathachristie.com/about-christie/how-christie-w...

I think the main confusion is about the speedrunning aspect. You don't speedrun gathering thoughts, you speedrun turning those thoughts (that took weeks, months, or years to develop) into writing. You may not struggle with writing, but a lot of people absolutely are.

Re: How to build quickly

#147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not so convinced that this is a property of functional programming as much as simply good programming. I’ve seen functional programs that pass around huge data structures that couple functionality. I’ve never seen the benefit of performing elaborate monadic dances to avoid state that would have been simpler to represent in a non-functional language.

Well this seems to me a violation of the spirit of functional programming, even if it's written in a functional programming language. Isolating state is the key principle. Philosophically you could say a program following this principle written in an object oriented or procedural language is more "functional" than a program that passes around a big tangle of state in a single data structure written in a functional la…

Yes, indeed. That’s my point really. Functional programming only delivers its promised benefits in the hands of skilled users. We’re just not used to seeing that given that it’s at a self-selecting crowd. Lambdas, ADTs, immutability - all of these exist in non-functional languages now and it’s great! It seems to me that this may be where the bulk of the value is, rather than functional purity.
Post reply on HN