Hacker News Reader

Comment by mythas | Hacker News Reader

Like most hard things in life the most honest advice anyone can give you is stop worrying about getting stuck, embrace confusion and learn to love being lost. If you can learn to not lose confidence when you’re in the wilderness then you have learned how to learn. Unfortunately this is challenging to do. It’s like telling someone the way to do a pull up is to do a pull-up. For self motivated people this is all the coaching they need. For most however, they need someone to hold their hand through all the steps.

View on HN

Actually, I was stuck for years, not being able to do a single pull-up, until I found a youtube video that explained how to progress in pull ups[1] The way was counterintuitive to me, so it would have never occurred to me.

The method consists in actually jumping, skipping the hardest part, then when being on top with the head above the bar, you let your body fall as slowly as you can. It turns out this works because in the eccentric phase your arm muscles are more powerful, but you are still able to progress overall.

The advice I would give is, as you said, embrace confusion but pay attention to where is your next mentor, the one that will show you that little trick or that little piece of understanding that will get you progressing.

[1](spanish)https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tQxbnI3QFBE

Another way is to work negatively. So in a sense you do a pull up by doing a reverse pull up— that is you start at the top of the pull us and lower yourself as slowly as possible (like in you’re method). Just rather than pulling yourself up you just jump yourself or step up to the top. After so many sessions of that you’ll be doing them without much difficulty.

I’ve found in learning the process can be similar. If I don’t understand something I can only read so much and study so much. I have to get my hands into it. I will pull down a codebase, run it, change it, break it, fix it, try and emulate it from first principles and contrast that with my reading and repeat. The best way I’ve found so far is to couple that with bottom up learning— working and reworking the fundamentals as I capitulate and bounce off the walls of reverse engineering and experimenting. I can’t confirm the benefits of that for anybody else but it works for me and keeps me interested

Uh, isn’t that exactly what the parent comment just said? It sounded to me like they were doing negatives.

Not to me. But granted— they linked a video displaying supine form whereas I assumed, without watching, they'd shown wide pronate. The latter form is notoriously difficult and I felt like detailing further would be helpful.

The quickest example I could find (of pronate form) is this guy, (but he's right): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yLXn2OtQmxo

Wanted to add, off topic but for interested parties of the digression, a good resource— Scott.. from Boston? never checked. But he's pretty good: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MogM8PlV1NI

You get the fastest progress if you start the exercise with a weight that you can actually lift a few times in a row. Fortunately there is a way to decrease your effective weight when doing pull-ups - tie a resistance band on the pull-up bar and rest your knee against the bottom part of the loop. Start with a heavy resistance band and progress towards light and finally none.

I was a TA for a freshman college class that would deliberately give homework assignments on things not covered in lectures. We were told to direct the students to resources that would help them learn these things, but not teach them directly. You should have heard the wailing and gnashing of teeth! The general consensus among those students a few years later was that they were glad for the wake-up call: most things you'll have to learn are not entirely handed to you in class, and the sooner you learn to get on with your life in such a world, the better off you are.

(We down-weighted those assignments in the grading, of course, so that people with GPA requirements for scholarships didn't suffer.)

Author here. Thanks for your comments! I would like to, in the future, write articles going into more detail about how to explore new codebases.

I spent hours last night figuring out why some base64 PNGs wouldn't render. That used to be a classic example of something that would frustrate me to my wits end. But this time it was so much fun to understand the problem intimately.

It helps that I have the flexibility to dig in instead of feeling the timeline pinch.

> For most however, they need someone to hold their hand through all the steps

Part of intellectual maturity is learning how to not need the hand.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com