Haskell (not just monads, though they were impressive too)
Ask YC: What have you learned that rocked your world?
41–50 of 85 posts
Re: Ask YC: What have you learned that rocked your world?
#42"... What have you learned that rocked your world? ..." Mostly about empirical observations about the natural world. One very simple idea while in High School studying physics & chemistry that "the iron in your blood flowing through your arteries is composed of left over bits of exploded starts (Iron)" . Another is how little we really observe and notice things. Every week I make a habit of exploring & looking for ne…
To take it up a notch, everything in your body is composed of left over bits of exploded stars.
Re: Ask YC: What have you learned that rocked your world?
#43Lisp macros
Re: Ask YC: What have you learned that rocked your world?
#44Godel's incompleteness theorems.
How did that rock your world? I'm not asking you to explain the theorems -- I understand them -- just indicate why or how they are significant to you.
In brief, they're mathematical proofs that certain things are unknowable. Mathematics rarely gets so close to theology. And religion is rarely so certain.
Re: Ask YC: What have you learned that rocked your world?
#45GIZA++ and statistical machine translation tools.
Re: Ask YC: What have you learned that rocked your world?
#46Girls like sex too.
It rocked my world to know why all comments with the word sex in it were immediately upmodded.
Turns out, people really really like sex. A lot.
Re: Ask YC: What have you learned that rocked your world?
#471. Ludwig Wittgenstein's "Tractatus Logico Philosophicus" (the extremism of the idea, the solemn (poetic?) tone that nevertheless emerges from the sentences of such a rigorous work)
2. RMS reflections about morals in software programming (I may not wholly agree, but he taught me a whole new way of thinking about software)
3. Prolog declarative approach (instead of describing how to solve a problem, just describe the problem)
Re: Ask YC: What have you learned that rocked your world?
#48Girls like sex too.
I wonder how many girls upmodded that comment?
Re: Ask YC: What have you learned that rocked your world?
#49"We can implant entirely false memories"[1] I also remember being really suprised when I first learned the Central Limit Theorem[2] a long time ago. That said, Hofstadter's "Gödel, Escher, Bach"[3] probably had the biggest impact on me. [1] http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2003/dec/04/science.resear... [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_limit_theorem [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gödel,_Escher,_Bach
The Central Limit Theorem... that's a good one. Come to think of it, I felt enlightened by it even despite a teacher who wanted to be an actuary but had to teach AP Stat instead because she couldn't pass her actuarial exam, in addition to all the usual horrors bemoaned in the Lockhart essay that was posted the other day. I suppose that suggests that under more organic learning conditions, it would have been quite exciting.
Re: Ask YC: What have you learned that rocked your world?
#50Euler's equation. That conservation laws follow from deeper symmetry principles (Noether's theorem). Symmetry under translation corresponds to conservation of momentum, symmetry under rotation to conservation of angular momentum, symmetry in time to conservation of energy! http://mathworld.wolfram.com/NoethersSymmetryTheorem.html
This has to do with the context where I learned Euler's Equation, but I can never separate it from Fourier and (later) Laplace transforms. Those are all so beautiful and mind blowing.
I'll second that Fourier transform. The idea that you could represent basically a list of numbers with a sum of sines, or any other orthonormal set is mindblowing to me. Nothing in math has blown my mind as much as functional analysis.