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Becoming Foolish

hmemcpy.com

167 pointsmatthewwarren31 comments

Nice article.

One thing I'm noticing is that I have less and less time to learn and explore.

Between the work projects, the open-source projects of my spare time, family life and the entertainment I need to keep some sanity, I can't seem to find the time or the focus necessary for expanding my knowledge.

I still do a lot of learning, but as I suspect that most of you are doing, the learning I'm doing is only incremental and in small dozes. This means that I end up rejecting solutions that invalidate my prior knowledge, because those require a leap of faith and resources that I don't have.

Maybe this is what growing old feels like — experience and responsibilities ends up getting in the way of learning.

I do feel the need to become foolish again.

Time is fixed and the things we want to learn is expanding. I'm not sure how to deal with that. For me, there's a real tension between breadth and depth and finding the sweet spot between the two is hard.

This perfectly describes my learning dilemma. If you have a niche job like in the article (visual studio extensions) your skill-set may be narrow enough to easily expand upon and gain depth in a new area. If you are a full stack developer at a small company the breadth of stuff you need to know and learn is such that it seems impossible to master new things.

On this note, I highly recommend Edward Kmett's talk -- Stop treading water: Learning to learn

Talk slides: http://yowconference.com.au/slides/yow2014/Kmett-StopTreadin...

This is the only link I can find to the video, which unfortunately seems inaccessible now: https://twitter.com/kmett/status/574920781790113793?lang=en

EDIT: I found this -- https://vid.me/vJvm/stop-treading-water-learning-to-learn-by...

It would be great if someone could link to the video.

A lovely post. The Haskell-I/O-inspired brainflip is very nicely described.

I've never been a Haskell programmer, but a thing that struck me about the Idris book (which is mentioned in one of the comments on that post) is its very calm introduction to monadic I/O in terms of the separation between evaluation and execution - which the author of the book (and developer of Idris) manages without using the word monad, I assume deliberately.

There are a lot of appealingly surprising things in Idris. Other languages that have given me that "oh...!" feeling in the further past include Prolog and term-rewriting languages like Pure (and to an extent TeX).

The Idris book is awesome. Also, Liquid Haskell is awesome, if Idris is too painful.

That's why in germany the first course in the first semester of CS teaches you three things: imperative programming, functional programming and logical programming. That way you can choose your favorite programming paradigm early on in your career and don't get surprised and wonder what would have been if you found it earlier in your career. I hope other countries teach programming like that as well

I’m not sure “That way you can choose your favorite programming paradigm early on in your career” is the intended or even desireable result.

I have the impression that people tend to turn to functional programming after spending a lot of time in imperative programming and seeing its downsides.

This remembers me of the Blub paradox from "Beating the average" [1] from Paul Graham.

Learning new ways how to express things is never bad.

[1]: http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html

Don't learn languages - learn pure paradigms. I can write C# three different ways - imperative procedural, functional, imperative OOP.

I have seen imperative / OOP Python written in the style of Java. It's not great.

bingads python library.

Someone’s getting their line count up.

Relevant video: Stop Writing Classes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o9pEzgHorH0

Thats the nice thing about a mixed paradigm language, you can use the features when appropriate.

Not everything can be expressed in C#, and it usually requires much more boilerplate. Try writing a method which abstracts over a generic type, such as List<T> and Queue<T>, for example.

It's not clear exactly which video gave the paradigm shift...can anyone enlighten me?

It is explicitly named in the article.

There has to be a better way of stopping people from upvoting with alt accounts, or emailing a listserve asking for upvotes.

One way would be to make sure the article generates good discussion. There are no comments on this article other than complaints that it's on the front page...

(Genuine Question) Is an article only considered good if it generates a large discussion?

What about if people read it, found it thought provoking, but didn't have anything to add, to discuss?

I agree. I thought this was a great article and don't have much to add. Is there any evidence there is vote rigging in action here.

Same. I upvote all the time but rarely comment.

I would prefer this over the "me too!" or "here is my irrelevant/off topic opinion" comments we get all the time. Not everything has to generate 100 comments of debate.

I thought it was a good read and gave me a little motivation to learn Haskell. I upvoted... is that a problem?

There's a HN clone that ranks stories higher if they have less comments. More comments can just mean more controversial.

Given that I downvoted you and your comment did not turn gray, I have to assume that you've been up-voted by other people.

Shooting down a blog article written by somebody from his heart, while upvoting yellow journalism — that's a common phenomenon here on HN — and I should know because this is my 9th year as an HN visitor and contributor.

So such mean comments being upvoted, that doesn't look good, but on the other hand I can't say that I'm surprised. But to answer your particular comment ...

HN actually does a pretty good job at detecting voting rings, along with upvotes triggered by mailing / social list. HN's detection is so aggressive in fact that it has many false positives, making it easy to bury stories you don't like ;-)

And to blog authors out there — please write more, as I'm interested in genuine feelings and opinions, not by PR pieces written by corrupt media outlets.

> making it easy to bury stories you don't like

I don't believe that's true and have reason to doubt it. But if you (or anyone) think you're seeing a case of this, please send a link to hn@ycombinator.com. We'll look into it.

This item has 6 points and is number #6 on Hackernews' homepage. The fuck?

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html see "How are stories ranked?"

Right, when the stories on the front page are older that time factor dilutes their high scores, giving lower-score but newer posts an advantage.

I think it would be interesting to display the derivative of votes with respect to time, or a Wilson score or something. I assume there are good reasons why you don't, but nonetheless it interests me.

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