Ask HN: Does being practical act as a hinderance to one’s imagination?

I can't say I've noticed much of a difference in my professional life. As I've gotten older and gained more experience, my mental toolbox has increased in size and refined in quality. This leads to more solutions being clear from the get-go than when I was younger.

But when nothing comes to mind up front? If anything, I feel that my ability to sort the 'hey, that just might work!' wheat from the fanciful chaff is sharper than before.

That doesn't mean I can force it, and I think this point is important enough to emphasize- if I hit a block on an obvious next step, I stop and go for a walk. Listen to music, hang out with my dogs. Maybe play with a recipe in the kitchen, or create a new belt hell-world in Factorio. Let your 'default mode' network ruminate and digest. Nine times out of ten by the next day I've discovered a new approach to work with.

One technique I learned in 5th grade is called "brainstorming." It's a simple concept---you get a group together (or you can do this alone---you just skip one step). You establish a clear problem statement. Then for 10 or 15 minutes, everybody writes down ideas to solve the problem. Nothing detailed, just a few words per idea. And no judgement at this time. Just ideas, no matter how silly ("feed mayonnaise to tuna fish" for example) until time is out.

Then one person starts reading their list, and everybody checks their lists for that idea and cross it out. Then the next person goes, reading any remaining ideas and so on until all you have left are unique ideas (and it doesn't matter if all your ideas are crossed out---remember, no judgements yet). If you are alone, you can skip this step.

Then, and only then, do you go through the final list of ideas and discuss them. Here, you judge the ideas, reject some, combine others, mix, match, and puree until you get something that works.

Yes, pragmatic and practical are directly opposed to clever or creative thinking. The trick is to know when to apply each one, and to apply enough of the former to have time for the latter.

In every application or machine I write code for, there is typically one, sometimes two, really interesting problems. But there are innumerable bits of boring business logic to implement along the way. You sometimes need to be willing to have a method copy-pasted with trivial changes in three places (which bothers me sometimes, thinking it would be better to have one method with a parameter to select between the variations) in order to have time to develop an extensible, adjustable, clever solution somewhere else.

how to upgrade KARMA ?

That's very interesting. I considering doing this but it seemed like an awful lot of work needed to start. There was a boom of 'learn to code' sites recently but looks like nobody really tackled it from that angle.