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

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

#761

Post by whynaut »

wreath wrote: post #731
ShredKazoo wrote: post #718

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah that's definitely an understandable feeling. But on the other hand, if representation matters (as others in this thread claim), it seems hard to please everyone? Supposing you had a group that's 100% white by accident, and they know representation matters. Because they're 100% white, they're starting from a disadvantage: If you want representation, it helps to have representation already! So from this perspectiv…

But why does representation of different skin colors matter or ethnicity matters? There are very very few occasions where it does, but in most everyday situations like work, sports etc it really doesn't. I'd rather be classified by an attribute that's relevant to the situation such as skill level or expertise rather than arbitrary attribute like my skin color, why not my height or color of my teeth instead?

Didn't we already establish upthread why it matters? Why are we backtracking 5 comments deep?

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

#762

Post by _dain_ »

carapace wrote: post #246
marshmellman wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you share what helped it click? I’m in the same boat, trying to understand it through analogies.

These are physical properties that can be experienced (although there is some risk) for voltage you can touch a Van de Graaff generator, for current you can touch a battery to your tongue. That's the way to understand electricity without analogies. :) Anyway, voltage is always measured between two points (one is typically called "ground" but that's not important here.) It's a difference. (A difference of what? No one…

>Current is always measured through a single point. It's a count of the charge flowing past a point per time unit. (What is charge? No one knows. "Charge" is just a name for the mysterious something that "voltage" is a difference of...)

I think you're being overly mysterious here. It's the number of electrons passing through the wire per second. And charge isn't the thing that voltage is a difference of; it's potential difference, as in electric potential energy. The "water in a pipe" analogy really isn't that bad; it's gravitational potential instead of electrical potential, and amount of water instead of amount of electrons.

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

#763

Post by whynaut »

quacked wrote: post #588
jasonwatkinspdx wrote: post #564

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I answered you clearly. Ethnic homogeneity is a smoke signal. Ethnic whiteness is exceptional. You're past my line with ascribing what I think and who from in a way that's literally just you ranting your imagination at me. You have no idea my mind on any of these things based on our conversation thus far. Talk about the self report...

If you were teleported back to the year 0 and went to what is now the US and encountered a large ethnically homogeneous tribe, what exactly would that smoke signal to you? (Editing: as far as "ascribing what you think", the only things I've ascribed to what you think that you think that ethnic homogeneity in post-European white population is morally improper, which is exceedingly clear from the phrasing of the first…

Imagine being so reductive you lost the point along the way

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

#764

Post by whynaut »

crackercrews wrote: post #525
yieldcrv wrote: post #511

Earlier quoted context omitted.

because they didn't need the MBA for the roles they did land its all part of one contiguous complete thought

You also say: > the connections resulted in no improved professional access or ability to exchange time for food and shelter. When you make such broad statements, then walk them back in comments downstream, it makes conversation unfruitful.

When you ignore such large chunks of context, it makes conversation unfruitful

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

#765

Post by whynaut »

crackercrews wrote: post #390
fortituded0002 wrote: post #196

1. Everyone is the main character in their own story. This manifest in all sorts of ways - from people not being there when you need them the most, from friends dying off as soon as proximity changes, to how and why get people get promoted in jobs. This isn't necessarily bad, but if you don't know how to navigate this it can be quite painful and confusing. 2. Representation matters. I knew this for a long time, but i…

Interesting interplay between 2 and 3. Why does representation matter so much if these are just human-created constructs? Genuinely interested to know how the same person had both of these epiphanies.

why does debt matter so much? human-created construct

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

#766

Post by escalt »

DylanSp wrote: post #115

Matrix multiplication. First encountered it in high school, where the textbooks presented matrices without any real motivation, and matrix multiplication just seemed like a weirdly-defined operation. Once I got to linear algebra in college and matrix multiplication was presented as the way to compose linear transformations, it made a lot more sense.

The "essence of linear algebra" series by 3blue1brown on YouTube does a really good job at intuitively explaining and visualizing matrix multiplication and other linear algebra topics.

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

#767

Post by rramadass »

monero-xmr wrote: post #744
rramadass wrote: post #492

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No need to tone it down; You were right in calling out the GP. To dismiss the whole of OOD/OOP so cavalierly just goes to show they don't know what they are talking about. Much of the success of Modern Software is directly due to the wholesale adoption of OOD/OOP in the last few decades.

OOP is successful despite of itself. My point is it’s just an inferior way of programming and there is no reason to use it other than legions of OOP programmers who take it as gospel. Obviously this is an opinion but it’s informed by lots of experience in new and legacy code bases.

To be blunt, you are stating "opinions" without any basis in facts; hence it is hard to take you seriously.

Separation of Concerns, Modularization, Reusability, Type Hierarchies, Type Composition, Interface contract-based programming, Frameworks etc. were all made mainstream by OOD/OOP. These are things taken for granted by programmers today. As somebody who has been doing OOD/OOP since the early nineties i can tell you it was the single biggest reason for the explosion of Software in the past few decades.

As a concrete example, early in my career i had programmed in C using the Windows API; both 16-bit and Win32 (Thank you Charles Petzold). It was difficult, tedious and a lot of work. And then Microsoft introduced MFC (Microsoft Foundation Classes) Framework with Visual C++ IDE. With a few clicks of the wizard, i had a complete skeleton application with a lot of hard work already done for you. That was a revelation for me on the power of OOD/OOP. Things i had slaved over in Win32 was now at the fingertips of every noob who could type. The same revelation happened (but not to the same extent) when i moved from Xlib to Motif on Unix platforms.

I had pointed you to Bertrand Meyer's book OOSC2 (in my other comment) as the book to read to understand OOD/OOP. Another great book to study is Barbara Liskov and John Guttag's Program Development in Java: Abstraction, Specification, and Object-Oriented Design.

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

#768

Post by DrewADesign »

493579620678 wrote: post #734
DrewADesign wrote: post #654

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "talk about race less" (as a way to treat people more equally, and reduce discrimination) seems like a reasonable hypothesis to test. This was the status quo for a very long time. Mentioning people's race was like mentioning people's weight. It didn't work. > I'm also not convinced that what we're doing now is working better than what was done in the 90s and 00s. The 2005 study "Are Greg and Emily More Employable T…

What makes you think talking more about race works any better or should be considered to be "social progress" rather than the opposite? Would that study have better results if done today? I'm not American, but I don't see why you are so sure today's America is not closer to the Jim Crow Era than 2005 was. I'm a black person who grew up in Sweden in the 00s and early 10s, and I'm very glad race was never relevant or t…

You should read about the experiences of African Americans. Many cultural facets and political tensions held over from slavery are alive and well.

Financially, income inequality in Sweden is vastly lower than in the United States as it is, and in the United States much of the inequality falls on racial boundaries. A recent Federal Reserve Bank of Boston study found that local white household’s median net worth was $247,000 while for African American households it was $8. Yes, eight single dollars. The Black population in Boston has been well established for well over a century, and much of its white population came in waves of western European immigration in the early to mid 20th century.

Not talking about this problem hasn't solved it so far because systemic self-perpetuating inequality doesn't just go away if you ignore it.

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

#769

Post by carapace »

andsoitis wrote: post #702
carapace wrote: post #423

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it's generally considered a pseudoscience. Only by people who have no experience with it. NLP ("Neurolinguistic Programming", not Natural Language Processing) is pre-scientific , yes, but that's not the same as being a pseudoscience, and calling it such is a disservice. We have pretty much discovered the operating system of the human mind. applying the principles and techniques discovered and systematized under the…

> pre-scientific What does that mean?

The NLP people have developed a body of models and techniques for rapid and durable psychological changes. This body of work is systematic and repeatable, but the NLP folks haven't (yet!) "done science to it" to try to figure out why these techniques work.

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

#770

Post by [deleted] »

JanisErdmanis wrote: post #242

Superconductivity. I did four PhD projects regarding superconductivity properties at nanoscale without really getting hold on the concept. For instance, how zero resistance is related to cooper pair tunnelling and BdG Hamiltonian. Only when I was forced to write introduction a month before my thesis submission I gave my best last try for the farewell and it clicked. Note the title of my thesis “Quantum effects of sup…

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