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Ask HN: What bits of fundamental knowledge are productivity multipliers?
421–424 of 424 posts
Re: Ask HN: What bits of fundamental knowledge are productivity multipliers?
#422Earlier quoted context omitted.
> the majority of finished code generated by professionals goes unused What are you referring to?
I'm referring to how companies ignore the thorny problem of what to build and instead focus on getting "Something done", which results in delivery of product increment that users at best say "meh" to, and don't use. As an aside, from a developers perspective, all of the work is clearly valuable, I mean they got paid 300k+. But from a true definition of value perspective, the change increment is just not valuable to t…
> from a developers perspective, all of the work is clearly valuable, I mean they got paid 300k+
Midwestern US salary caps are more like $90k-$150k.
Re: Ask HN: What bits of fundamental knowledge are productivity multipliers?
#423Earlier quoted context omitted.
I took calculus in high school and did really well in it - but I honestly can’t say whether I’ve used it or not as an adult, because all of my mathematical knowledge kind of runs together in my head. I realize it’s a big ask, but is there any way you’d be willing to put together an example of when and how you’ve used calculus for a specific purpose where it really shines?
Work-related, I built a backend of a database engine on top of a transactional distributed key-value store. When building a secondary index, suppose you traverse the primary index in a series of transactions, reading a batch of key/values and updating the secondary index. With the scheme that was used to build the index, this has the chance of conflicting with an incoming write, which will also try to update the seco…
Here is a new example. I was thinking about strategy as a pro golfer playing in a 72-hole tournament. Generally, you want to minimize expected value, get the lowest average score on each hole. It is obvious that near the end of the tournament, if you're behind, you want to play riskier golf, and if you're in the lead, you want to play less risky golf. That maximizes your chance of winning. This means instead of optimizing for expected value, you sacrifice expected value in exchange for higher or lower variance, respectively.
What I realized a couple of days ago is that even earlier in the tournament, you don't want to optimize expected value -- you always want to give some of that for higher variance. Why? Because in the variance/EV trade-off curve, the slope of the curve is zero at the maximum value, which means to add h units of variance, you give up o(h), realistically, O(h^2), expected value. So there is some value of h where the trade-off is worth it.
(Concrete example: Golf tournaments could be modeled as a coin-flipping contest, where you get +1 point for flipping heads, -1 point for flipping tails, with 72 coin tosses. Suppose you could pay a 0.01 point cost to double the point value, i.e. you get +1.99 or -2.01 as a result of the coin toss. Then you should, because doing so on the first coin tosses will increase your chance of winning.)
Re: Ask HN: What bits of fundamental knowledge are productivity multipliers?
#424- Writing as form of (or tool for) thinking; Leslie Lamport said (maybe quoting someone) that if you're thinking, but not writing, you only think that you're thinking; - High tolerance for feeling ignorant, confused, silly, inadequate, a novice: none of these states should phase you: you should not have a comfort zone: let your mind feel at ease in not understanding something: go to the eye of the storm and weather i…
> High tolerance for feeling ignorant, confused, silly, inadequate, a novice What are some tools to do this? When I feel I don’t know something, I feel very anxious, stupid and unhappy. How did you develop the skill to be okay when ignorant?
This is pretty much about learning to deal with your feelings. Different things work for different people. Mindfulness and acceptance have been interesting concepts to explore for me. Though there too exist a variety of approaches. Explore related literature.