Ask HN: What's the best aha moment you've had?

Few years ago, I started getting a package almost everyday from my recently deceased Uncle's 82 year old wife. It was anything from small things like old photos and key chains, to larger items like a traditional India "Thali" meal plate made of silver, an Ivory (from a real elephant :( and more.

Turns out she was clearing out the late Uncle's garage and stuff all around the house, and returning gifts from my family back to us, and doing the same with others (friends and relatives who had sent my uncle stuff). Mind you, he wasn't a hoarder. It was just things people gave him over the (many) years and he kept them because of the emotional element (friend, family) attached to such things.

Old and frail herself, I remember my Aunty spent a good few months -- almost a year -- shedding the baggage. The postage alone must've cost her a few 1000 $s. Not to mention packing, taking stuff to Good Will etc. It reminded me of the quote from Fight Club - "The things that you own end up owning you.".

On that day, a young 16 year old me decided to never store or keep anything with me and become a minimalist, even if it was an "emotional" thing. Because I don't want me or my surviving family to have to go through something like this ever! I also don't buy any gifts for anyone, and instead give cash whenever I am obligated to give a present or gift (think weddings, birthdays etc)

When I lived in Sweden, I noticed a lot of the 2nd generation immigrants from the middle east behaved very similarly to black and latino people I knew from back home in the US. Very different styles, petty crime, boisterous behavior that stood out in a crowd, etc.

I wondered why it was so similar, even though all the cultures involved were completely different. The other thing that puzzled me was that Sweden has a nearly infinitely superior social safety net to the US. So why, despite free education, job training, and plenty of resources to get a foothold, did these people lash out like many minorities in the US?

My aha moment was that it just had to do with being a minority culture. That's all it is. When a group's culture norms and values are not accepted/tolerated by the majority, the minority group has a hard time being a part of society. Even in a peaceful, tolerant place like Sweden.

It helped me open my own eyes as a white man, and now I can see this sort of thing playing out all around me. It's also universal, no matter when you go to in the world.

There is one major and rather sad exception though: when a white person or group is the minority in a place, it is not likely they will experience the same effects. Whiteness, and white culture seems to be universally desired (at least from my limited experience).

There is only one currency: time.

You can trade this for everything else - the exchange rate is up to you.

In an astronomy class, our professor gave us the formula for Escape Velocity. It's typically used to calculate how fast a rocket must go to get out of the gravitational pull of the planet. It's a simple formula that takes into account the mass of both objects, and their distance.

As you make the mass of the larger object greater and greater, it becomes clear that eventually the escape velocity can be greater than the speed of light.

That's all a black hole is: A gravity well strong enough that even light itself cannot escape.

I knew this already to some extent, but the simplicity of the math really stunned me.

When I was 13 years old I figured out that people of other faiths believe in their Gods just as fervently as my devout and conservative family believed in theirs.

Since truth isn't determined by where you happen to be born, it seemed unlikely that my family's God was the one true God while all the others were false.

That's the "aha" moment that changed the course of my life.

Well, that and learning Bayes' theorem.

When writing SQL you are describing the result you want, not the way to achieve it.

It helped me understand functional programming too.

One of my childhood memories was finding a piece of yellow plastic broken off of some toy that had lots of colorful little symbols and ornaments printed on it. It lay buried in grass for a few years at that point and it went almost white, bleached by the sun. I stood a while, pondered and remembered the toy as I had remembered it further in the past. Fast forward to my late 20s. I started, not too systematically, learning quantum mechanics because I always felt that, although regarded as an intimidating topic, it is probably a thing that is, given a bit of time, not too complicated to understand and involves just as much forgetting established ideas as it involves understanding new ones. And THAT I have on lock down, you hand me ideas no matter how complicated and I will forget the shit out of them so hard it's gonna make your head spin, tremendous. So when learning about entropy and information conservation it struck me: Every time a photon tickled my child self and told me about the way atoms of my toy were arranged, black ones here, yellow ones there, my god even some god damned green ones, that information was not handed to me for free. It was taken from my toy and not only when I saw it but for as long as it lay there enjoying the sun, it sent its information out to everyone passing by, even back into the sky, while putting on its new dress which was designed with a die and tailored by nuclear fusion. Some of it will have waved pluto good bye before the real journey began. Year in, year out. And, finally, it showed. Patterns grew less strong. Distinctions between different regions of the plastic died off. And the information from all the times I saw my toy was, as exclusively as anything, mine. Noone else ever laid hands on these particular bits. They are with me, still, because they tipped a few neurons of mine into a state stable enough to last a few decades. They are slowly leaking, for instance into your brain right now, but I am sure I will not run out until I turn senile.

TL;DR quantum mechanics made me realise that all my toys were doomed but that I managed to secure some of their essence

Figuring out it's never worth it to work more then 40 hours a week at a job where I'm making someone else money.

When i was something between 11 and 14: I was going to an eletronic store with my father to buy a cd player for me (i was looking forward to it) and my sisters where watching tv while they were already over there time budget.

I didn't want that (not sure what english word would fit here) and pulled out the cable and the plug broke. My father was annoyed/angry and i was crying because we nearly didn't drive to that electronic store.

I realized two things: 1. enviousness/distrust/jealousy is stupid 2. me being angry/crying about a situation i can't change doesn't change that situation

I got less emotional/more rational after this event.

I also think that this was one key point to become a nihilist.

At age 14, I realised if I have to be in school, I could just as well listen to what was said. This resulted in learning a bunch of useful stuff.

The satisfaction of proving someone wrong is not worth the effort.

starting a business is all about building a sales funnel.

love is about appreciation, not possession.

Most things people tell you that are important are not (at all) important. Realizing that removed all stress and since then everything has become easier business wise as well.

Amiga 500 at age 14ish. Simple as that :). Done & done.

Recently, I realized that instead of putting the pressure to launch a website specifically, I could launch products within the website instead. This got me to start writing, sharing, and getting feedback immediately, and has made me feel much more comfortable that I'm building something people will actually use.

Money is a medium for trading value. Everything in business comes down to creating value, and then exchanging it for money.

If you set up a system that generates more value than it costs, you have a business. The difference between how much it makes vs how much it costs is your profit.

When I was in high school and realized for the first time that the 6502 assembler mnemonic LDA was the same as the number 169, thus bridging assembler source code with its machine code representation.

It was when I learned that the genetic code actually resides in the set of tRNA-synthatase enzymes that couple the appropriate amino acid to appropriate tRNA.

Finally getting the combo of recursion and pattern matching in Elixir, and other functional languages I supoose. Almost fell off my chair.

One day at age 4 I, for some reason, was cranky. I went with my dad to a kiosk close to our home where this big smily overweight owner always gave a little something as a snack when I came.

This time I got nothing and I asked my dad why after we came out. He said "I dont know, but you seamed really cranky." and I realised that my attitude affects the attitude of others.

In E&M class, seeing Maxwell's equations be manipulated into the wave equations that predict a propagating EM wave.

That money != wealth.

Even if you give everyone 1 million dollars, NOT everyone will become rich (wealthy) because eventually this money would flow from your hands to the hands of someone that creates value. And you'd end up with the same poor/rich social strata, but now with high inflation.

Wealth is value creation. Money is just a medium.

around 2012 when I finally decided to start a side project to try to contribute something to the world.

How much luck and who you know plays in determining the success of a business.

At about age 20 I realized that the epicureans were right. Sorting the important from the less important became much easier.

Must be system dynamics for me. When I first learned of the math and the idea of modelling the world like that, it explained _a lot_.

Not the biggest aha. But when I figured out how VLQ encoding works in a source map, I did a hoora!

I always get my best "aha"s when I've found the source of an OOM in Java.

Being ~5 years old, after tearing down a roly-poly toy to see how it works.

Understanding Godel, and that God set it up this way.

I laughed hysterically.