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

I was like this too. I had no interest in ol' Bill. Then I read his 'best' works. And then I read them again. It takes a bit to get really used to iambic pentameter, to the old words, to the places and people he was writing for, to his limitations of candlelight and lack of amps, etc.

Reader, it is totally worth it.

There are very many very good reasons that he is still produced and studied. I encourage you in this new year to give him a solid try. Not just a play or two. Read him and watch the plays at the same time. There are hundreds of productions on YT for every play of his, all free, most very good.

Some students will like the sour candy; others won't. Some will like coconut; others won't. Some will love nuts; others will hate them.

Now you let the students talk to each other and trade candy. The ones who like sour candy but hate coconut will trade with the students with the opposite preference, and so on.

At the end of the trades, everybody is happier with their new bundle - why would they have traded otherwise? So value has increased. But this is magic - no new candy was produced! Through trade we have increased overall value - the exercise was positive sum.

With some effort you can see that a middle man might add value by expediting trades - connecting people who like coconut with people who hate it (suppose there are thousands of students in the class who all speak different languages).

And you can see how fiat currency might make things easier. Rather than having to come up with the barter value of coconut candy and sour candy to nuts, you can convert both to a single unit and then trade units.

I was part of a choir in high school and early college, but never managed to get good at this, even though I knew well how skilled singing should sound.

More than a decade later, when I was really exhausted after tending to my infant child I let out a sigh of the same type that we did as exercise back in the choir("Aaaaaaaah"). To my surprise it was almost effortless despite making quite the sound due to it being more or less at the resonance frequency of the bones in my skull.

And then it dawned on me. It's essentially turning yourself into an elaborate fart pillow.

Of course there's much more to that in things like posture and the mentioned resonance, but I had that covered from years of training. The only piece missing was using the diaphragm correctly.

Now I sing daily and while my range is pretty average, I don't strain myself any more and can do it for hours. Also the tone is just so much better now.