Ask HN: Am I stupid? We need to talk | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Am I stupid? We need to talk

2 pointsmrwnmonm9 comments

I was reading the new announcement about WebKit support for Face ID and Touch ID and following the thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24829565, and it is just one of many times that I feel I need to be a super programmer to understand the topic.

I see a lot of confusion in the comments of that thread, so it is not just me.

Do we have a problem in tech that we don't present knowledge in simple way enough for 'normal' people to understand? Is that why we have a lot of intermediate programmers and a few advanced ones?

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Don't worry too much about what you don't understand, the truth is that at the current speed things are changing it won't matter in a couple years what you know now anyways.

Just keep reading and pick up what you can, and remember that just because you don't know how or why it works doesn't mean you can't make it work for you.

Eg: How many Uber drivers know how to fix a car? or How many social media stars know how to render a video, let alone what protocol is being used in the back end of the virtual server hosting it.

Back in the 70s and 80s computers were far less complex than they are now but only "smart" people knew how to use them....how did that work out for 99.9% of them?

Don't put too much value in the fact that these things are complicated right now as eventually they will get more complicated but easier to use, thus allowing the majority of non geniuses to take full advantage of the tech.

You have to be super smart to work in high tech topics. Just a bachelors in computer science has enough math that the average person would flunk, the same for engineering. If you are self taught go to Khan Academy to learn the math.

AI and ML are just two of the high tech subjects the average person won't understand how they work. They are too complex to teach without the linear algebra required for the course.

A lot of websites will use that feature for authentication, I don't see how is that a high tech topic. And I didn't know that using that feature requires knowledge in AI or ML. Am I missing something?

FaceID must use AI and ML to detect faces.

I am not talking about that at all.

What are you talking about? Most things invented these days are very complex. Take a long time to learn. You can't learn it in a day, it takes years.

That's a pretty easy article for one that contains a live code sample.

If you think it's bad to have to read something like that, imagine being a programmer who might have to take orders from someone who couldn't read something like that.

See

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Two_Cultures

So why there is a lot of confusion about the feature?

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