151–160 of 371 posts
edit a little stream of consciousness follows Curse of being gifted is very real. I wonder sometimes how many people couldn't break out of it and have ended up in bad jobs, or worse. Probably like many HNers I also suffered from it mightily in K-12 and by the time I realized what was going on, I was already so far behind that escaping school, rather than redoing years of what I missed, was the easier option. It took…
edit a little stream of consciousness follows Curse of being gifted is very real. I wonder sometimes how many people couldn't break out of it and have ended up in bad jobs, or worse. Probably like many HNers I also suffered from it mightily in K-12 and by the time I realized what was going on, I was already so far behind that escaping school, rather than redoing years of what I missed, was the easier option. It took…
Wow. Just wow.
edit a little stream of consciousness follows Curse of being gifted is very real. I wonder sometimes how many people couldn't break out of it and have ended up in bad jobs, or worse. Probably like many HNers I also suffered from it mightily in K-12 and by the time I realized what was going on, I was already so far behind that escaping school, rather than redoing years of what I missed, was the easier option. It took…
> I'm drawn towards groups that promise an intelligent gathering, but I'm frequently disappointed by what I find once I get there. Maybe you're looking in the wrong place. I don't think groups promising intelligence are a great place to look for intelligence (unless that "promise" is just your supposition, and not their claim). Either that, or you're looking for the wrong thing. I'm not sure what you're trying to fin…
> I enjoy the company of people with passion, more than I do that of "smart" people. Passionate people are experts at something, and they have something to teach me.
I wish I could upvote this a million times over.
I've often found that groups proposing to be built of smart people are often as not built of over-opinionated pretentious people who've come to believe they are intelligent through one way or another. It's why I've avoided high-IQ societies and the like. It's just a bother and I don't think I'm particularly enriched by them.
I've actually found that I do like energetic, "passionate", self-aware people more, which is probably why I've hung around HN so long.
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I can relate to that. College-level calculus burned me so much , I didn't had the algebra background necessary to grok it, much of it is memorizing heuristics and "tricks", and college professors (specially in my public uni) didn't had much patience either. I even did well in other math-related classes, but calculus was a chimera. Unfortunately, I fell so much behind the curriculum that I had to drop out of college t…
Out of curiosity, whose online math have you done?
- Introduction to mathematical thinking [1]
- Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy [2]
- Machine Learning (actually a CS course, but involves linear algebra and some calculus) [3]
- Calculus: Single Variable [4]
[1] https://www.coursera.org/course/maththink
[2] https://www.coursera.org/course/mathphil
I once heard of a developer that wanted to make programming more interesting to himself, by using just three names for all his variables. They where banana, apple and another fruit. He used only those names. I am not sure what he did, when he needed more than three, but that was what he did.
It might have made the thing more interesting for him, but made the things far more difficult for us others of the "pack".
Software development is about complexity. To manage complexity is the highest form of software development and the real challenge. Not the clever ideas, the talented implementation -- manage complexity can make your project, even your company succeed or fall.
I'm not gifted, I'm actually pretty dumb. Can anyone help a stupid normal person relate to this article?
This is the point at which your natural talent is exhausted and now you too need to learn the technique in order to make any advances. The problem is that your fellow athletes have already put in their 10,000 hours mastering the technique and building their muscle memory to achieve the best possible throw. And you rapidly fall behind, unable to keep up with their slow but relentless progress.
This is actually a poor analogy for knowledge work, but a similar principle applies. Many people get by being able to easily soak in the knowledge and intuit the correct solutions without having to put in much effort at all. Even if they fully understand the theory and practice of how to mechanically arrive at a solution, the habit of not having to invest significant energy in determining a solution stays with them. The problems get harder, beyond what their capacity to intuit affords them. Gaps in their knowledge become magnified and soon their understanding of a subject is shown to be a shallow house of cards. At this point, they could choose to accept that they need to completely change strategies, fill in the gaps, and no longer rely on their intuitition. However, habits die hard and many struggle in vain to wrap their heads around the problems instead of working through them systematically. Unwilling or not realizing that they need to change, they lose motivation and burn out.
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Yes, I came here looking for that. The lack of any specifics about the kernel issue at hand and the general attempt to project Age and Wisdom made me immediately suspicious.
ESR is known for this.
(from Everybody loves Eric Raymond)
Pretty hilarious reading this now, considering his contributions to version control in the past several years. I am not too familiar with all of the backstory, but Linus' creation of git seems like one of the most extreme cases of "Not Invented Here Syndrome" since... well Linux itself (half-joking).
I certainly won't complain when someone gets so frustrated with the current tool-o-the-week that they go out an build something superior.
edit a little stream of consciousness follows Curse of being gifted is very real. I wonder sometimes how many people couldn't break out of it and have ended up in bad jobs, or worse. Probably like many HNers I also suffered from it mightily in K-12 and by the time I realized what was going on, I was already so far behind that escaping school, rather than redoing years of what I missed, was the easier option. It took…
"a wife who's smarter than me"
Would love to know what metric you use to determine that she is smarter than you are. (I have some guesses of course but would rather hear why you think that and then reply with my thoughts.) I don't think it's a simple as "she keeps me on my toes".
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I'm assuming there was at least some scm in place before, but my few google searches haven't turned up what it was. Do you know? *edit: Didn't look hard enough, according to this: http://git-scm.com/book/en/Getting-Started-A-Short-History-o... it was just files and patches from 1991-2002. Seems crazy from a modern perspective...
Yeah, check this out from 1998 (two years before OP) https://lkml.org/lkml/1998/9/30/122