Discovering map while writing in scheme was enlightening! It opened my eyes to functional programming and more than made the all nighter worth it.
Ask HN: your biggest Aha moment as a hacker?
11–20 of 34 posts
Re: Ask HN: your biggest Aha moment as a hacker?
#12I was a goober used to test algorithms for a modem. I showed one of the PhD's a simplification, assuming that they knew of it. They didn't. It goes to show how simulation can lead to improvements.
Re: Ask HN: your biggest Aha moment as a hacker?
#13I had taught myself HTML and Javascript as my first adventure into writing code. A PC gaming related sites I visited often started doing some dynamic pages with Perl (this was the late 90s), and I just thought that was the bees knees, so I went off to learn Perl. I wrote a simple guestbook style script for a little site I had, uploaded it, went to the browser and got a nice 'Internal Server Error'. I read every line of code I had written, couldnt find the error, then realized my FTP client was set to upload in binary rather than ASCII. Uploaded the script again in the right mode, went to the site, and it worked. I didn't even know the difference between the two at the time.
It's not really an 'aha moment' that's on the same level as others mentioned here, but it was the first script I ever wrote. Before that, the dynamic portion of the internet seemed like magic. I've been hooked ever since. :)
Re: Ask HN: your biggest Aha moment as a hacker?
#14At my first serious job, I wrote part of the interface for an embedded product. Because we were a tiny company I helped assemble, shrink wrap and finally ship them. My Aha moment was when they finally left the warehouse and that real people would depend on our stuff. It integrated their security systems and has to work, real people would be affected by my work.
Re: Ask HN: your biggest Aha moment as a hacker?
#15When I realized that I hadn't learned languages, I'd learned techniques, and I could just change languages given a bit of time to bootstrap and some common starting points. Basically, paradigms were my Aha. Kinda lame, but apparently there are a lot of developers who haven't figured them out yet.
Not lame at all, the ability to think in and see abstractions is one of the most significant realizations in any/every area of life, regardless what field it occurs in.
My biggest Aha moment was when I realized that abstract art uses similar thought processes as computer science and software engineering to produce abstract representations of some aspect of reality. The specifics and logical rigor differ, but the general idea is the same.
Re: Ask HN: your biggest Aha moment as a hacker?
#16Going to a shell, telnet'ing to port 80 and getting back a bunch of HTML. At that particular time and level of knowledge that was a huge A-Ha moment for me.
Teh internet is just text sent over a series of pipes ;)
Re: Ask HN: your biggest Aha moment as a hacker?
#17These are the biggest AHA! moments that stuck out for me
1. Understanding recursion in C
2. Understanding lazy evaluation in Scheme
3. Figuring out how to implement lazy evaluation in C
Re: Ask HN: your biggest Aha moment as a hacker?
#181. When I first realized I could loop and conditionally branch inside it (my first programming lesson) to do interesting stuff.
2. When I got OOP, and later when I realized the folly of vicious mutability.
3. When I discovered FP, composability and the Turing machine.
4. When I lately realized that software development is a giant hack to solve various business problems. ;)
Re: Ask HN: your biggest Aha moment as a hacker?
#19Understanding the Continuation-Passing Style transformation, and how it makes the internal state of the interpreter explicit.
Re: Ask HN: your biggest Aha moment as a hacker?
#20When I first read the BSD Unix source code and realized in a way that I had not before that the kernel which ran my C programs was itself just another C program, compiled with the same kind of C compiler, debuggable with the same kind of debugger (in many cases).