Hacker News Reader

Comment by not_knuth | Hacker News Reader

This video is fantastic, especially if you've never really understood how Unicode worked before. Keeps it simple and gets to the point.

I remember seeing this a couple of years ago and thinking "If only this existed when I learned about UTF-8, this would've saved me a lot of bad explanations and time".

This is now my goto-video if anyone asks me how Unicode works.

View on HN

> This video is fantastic, especially if you've never really understood how Unicode worked before.

Can you people really learn things on videos? My brain sort of shuts down on audiovisual material, I can only really watch and understand light movies. For more complicated material, I can only learn it by reading. There's so much essential back and forth that is impossible on a video. With a text, you have everything already in front of you and your eyes and mind can wander freely. Maybe it's just me, but I really can't stand the fixed, inflexible rhythm that is imposed by listening to speech.

It is really common that you read only a glimpse of the entire text and trick yourself to have understood it, only realizing that mistake later. In some sense the text gives you too much information that your brain can cause frame drop, that's something you should be aware when you read the text (you for example need to rephrase the understood text yourself). By comparison a well-paced video can give the exact amount of information you have to tinker before moving on. I do agree that a well-paced video is much rarer than a well-written text in the whole internet.

Thank you! Frame-drop is a brilliant analogy.

It wasn’t until I started learning networking concepts from a third-level/college text book that I picked up in a second-hand shop that I realised how much my brain fools me into thinking I’m absorbing information encoded in words and diagrams. The end of each chapter had questions based on the material covered in that chapter and it was only while attempting to answer them that I realised how much I had thought I’d absorbed – but hadn’t.

When buying technical books, I now try to get ones that have questions or exercises at the end of each chapter. If not, I take notes while reading by attempting to summarise each section in my own words. Answering technical questions for other people is also a great way of consolidating knowledge and filling the gaps in my own understanding.

> trick yourself to have understood it, only realizing that mistake later.

Exactly. My point is that technical text is never read linearly (like a video). Reading is an active process, where you scan the whole page repeatedly for all the displayed formulas, then for apparitions on these formulas inside the text, then peek at the figure, then read some words in a paragraph while looking from time to time at the figure in case it is referenced by the text. After a few minutes you have grasped everything. At least this is how I read. Looking at a video is so passive and linear that you get bored after a few seconds.

Have you tried taking notes?

Maybe a silly question, but I do this a lot when I'm trying to pick up technical information from a video or a presentation, and it seems to help not least because the result is a durable, textual reference that also can provide starting points for further research. Too, you can pause a video and add a timestamp to your notes as an indexing tool for review.

I do this with a pen and a notebook, not digitally. I don't know about the vaunted "writing by hand helps memories form" effect; I can't say I've observed a dramatic difference, but maybe that's just because I keep my work and technical notes close to hand and refer to them when I need them. That said, I do recommend paper notes over digital ones for stuff like this, if only for the sake of simplicity, reliability, and ease of use.

I also like text, but if you're genuinely asking, yes! Video evidently works great for a lot of people. You can't seek it as well as text, so instead rely on your memory more to remember things that are still unclear or don't make sense yet, and see when they are explained later.

It's okay to have different learning styles I think, it's not too surprising to me that some prefer different medium

It's precisely the seeking that kills me. The only interface for seeking a video is a tiny, one-dimensional bar. How do you remember exactly where the right information occurs? On the other hand, text is visible as a whole, and the "seeking" is two-dimensional. Much more efficient to seek. I have a good visual memory and I tend to remember exactly where on a page the formula that I want appears, and just glance away at it without moving any muscles other than my eyes. To seek a part on a video, the process is overwhelmingly more complicated. And then the place where I was before the seek is lost, and you have to seek for it again. Argh!

Thanks for the answer, it turns out that we people are wildly different to each other.

Video can have chapters too, but I generally agree. The ideal format is probably text with pictures, animations, interactive models... when needed. It's a real shame that we don't have an electronic document format...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com