Lessons I wish I had been taught (1996) | Hacker News Reader

Lessons I wish I had been taught (1996)

alumni.media.mit.edu

278 pointsTomte62 comments

Ten Lessons I Wish I Had Been Taught (1997) [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23722803 - July 2020 (52 comments)

Lessons I Wish I Had Been Taught (1996) [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15989599 - Dec 2017 (28 comments)

Lessons I wish I had been taught (1996) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11747598 - May 2016 (20 comments)

Lessons I wish I had been Taught - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3220746 - Nov 2011 (20 comments)

Ten Lessons I Wish I Had Been Taught - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=110091 - Feb 2008 (1 comment)

"Ten Lessons I wish I Had Been Taught", by Gian-Carlo Rota - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=85611 - Dec 2007 (1 comment)

lol ppl keep submitting this. I knew what it was before even clicking the link.

It's new for someone!

https://xkcd.com/1053/

(Playing HN on easy mode: grab almost any top story from a few years ago and repost it. It's not even bad if people are interested.)

Id say it means there needs to be another way to browse the site, where an old story can be bumped, with a new comment section, but inherits the old link, with the old comments available, and old score data visible. You can see how many upvotes it got each time it came about.

You can ... kind of ... use Algolia in this way. It's pretty easy to search for the top submissions of the past day, week, month, or year:

Day: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=last24h&page=0&prefix=fals...

Week: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastWeek&page=0&prefix=fal...

Month: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastMonth&page=0&prefix=fa...

Year: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastYear&page=0&prefix=fal...

I really wish there were an easier way to list top stories for a specific period --- month or year would be good. Algolia does have a date-range-picker, but like many, it's cumbersome. It also generates date specifiers based on Unix timestamps (seconds since 1970-1-1). So here's the Best of 2012:

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateEnd=1356912000&dateRange=custom&...

That is:

  https://hn.algolia.com/?dateEnd=1356912000&dateRange=custom&dateStart=1325376000&page=0&prefix=false&query=&sort=byPopularity&type=story

Where:

  dateEnd=1356912000
  dateStart=1325376000

I've suggested using a shell script to generate URLs of interest. This could also of course be done in JS or the programming tool of your choice:

  for i in {5..15..5} do
      echo "https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=$( date -d "$i years ago" +%Y-%m-%d )"
  done

(See earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28806795)

There's also the "past" link, which can be used to show any one day's top stories: https://news.ycombinator.com/front

Reposts on HN are fine after a year or so (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html).

It's good for each new cohort of users to get exposed to the perennials and classics. Not everyone here is a grizzled veteran, thankfully.

The fact most of those submissions are actually pointing to unique URLs, should tell us something about academia, the practice and ethics of republishing, how valid content will effectively fight a continuous battle for memetic survival, and the innate fragility of the web as publication media.

It's Rota's 10th point, on ageing, that's ringing in my ears. I'm the oldest person in the room far too often (and the population growth of recent decades serves to increase the effect and maybe even accelerate its onset) and I can absolutely attest, with the benefit of belated hindsight, to Rota's observation that this transformation happened overnight in a simple erasure of a former life. I'm searching for any indication whether I can see how to formulate any potential insights from my recollection of my time prior to this moment, for the purpose of possible improvements in approach before this life event, but I'm rather lost in thoughts about my experience with the latter half of the ageing phenomenon which has never been so succinctly put.

Rota encourages you in your increasing age to enjoy being regarded as a institutional being. Possibly this needs to be updated in countries where there's been institutional and government scaling creep, because being perceived as institutional and bureaucratic (which effects I could already create too long before qualifying for Rota's advice) in my recent experience creates more difficulty than value with younger folk.

Edit: forgot now inserted that what I have been reflecting on is whether there's better ways leading up to becoming a overnight old aged institution .

I had the realization last week that the intern sitting next to me is young enough to be my son in a non scandalous manner, I am definitely in the the second half and there definitely was no transition period.

I do believe Gian-Carlo Rota would have fitted in quite well on HN:

   Activity                                Calories burned
  --------                                ---------------
  Writing one line of C.......................   10
  Debugging one line of C.....................  300
  Writing one line of Lisp....................    2
  Debugging one line of Lisp..................   20
  Writing one line of Fortran.................   25
  Reading e-mail..............................  200
  Writing e-mail..............................   -3
  Reading news................................ 1000
  Web-surfing ................................  100
  Working on thesis...........................    7
  Answering officemate's phone calls..........  432
  Wondering about the future..................  107
  Speculating about life on other planets.....  371
  Getting to know inner child.................  252
  Perfecting .plan file.......................39924
  Reading Wired...............................   15
  Writing limericks in assembly language......  924
  Sleeping in chair...........................   15
  Sleeping in chair, but leaning on desk......    7
  Sleeping on office floor  (with pillow).....   14
           (without pillow).....  257
  Choosing a new CD to work to................  333
  Dreaming (at night)......................... 4522
  Searching...................................  777
  Sorting.....................................  222

https://alumni.media.mit.edu/~cahn/life/activity.html

Edit: It's possible (likely?) this is Janet Cahn's (~cahn) activieties, not Gian-Carlo Rota's

How can writing email have negative calorie consumption?

Is this person usually eating while writing email? Is writing email an as-yet-undiscovered solution to world hunger?

Agree.

Yeah, this is happening to me now! the transition is happening quickly! :-O

pro sports. growing up, you are younger than the players, but around 35 or so you are older than most of them.

Find this such an odd assertion, it doesn’t make sense.

If you have peers around your age, and you continue to spend time with them (as friends, colleagues etc) then surely this is false.

I wonder if it’s more of a reference to academia? Most people figure out academia and quit, others want to stay but don’t make it, so the pyramid scheme leads to only one of a cohort surviving?

I'm not in academia, I'm in the industry, and I find the claim very accurate.

Sure, my ol' peers are around (sure, the sentence is false in the strict/pedantic sense), but the vast majority of people around me changed instantaneously. Replace "always" with "most of the time" and "instantaneous" with "much quicker than one would think" and such.

In any case, if the claim doesn't make sense to you... it might some day.

If someone like Gian-Carlo Rota took the International Math Olympiad how well would he do? Would someone with a PhD in math and some published papers find it easy? Or do Olympiad problems require a separate technique to solve them efficiently compared to dissertations and papers. Olympiad problems seme to be heavy in combinatorics, symmetry, and 'tricks' to find ways to simply them.

Wonder if it's the same thing with CS professors and Leetcode...

Contest math problems require specialized skills and tricks that are different from doing research. It's like asking how an elite soccer player would perform running the hurdles. Better than a lay person, perhaps very well with training, perhaps not.

Unless your PhD is very special, Olympiad requires different knowledge then what you do when doing PhD in math. Plus, Olympiad trains you to be proficient at solving known issues in 4 hours span. PhD trains you to be good at solving unknown issues for months/years.

If you are good in Olympiad style solving problems and have that months/years long endurance, you are likely to do well at PhD. (I know a guy who was good at Olympiad and completely sucked at anything that required longer attention span and was not fun to him as Olympiad was).

If you are good PhD student, you could likely train for Olympiad and do reasonably well. However, it may be quite possible you wont never be as fast or that you will find it not fun.

“ Give them something to take home It is not easy to follow Professor Struik's advice. It is easier to state what features of a lecture the audience will always remember, and the answer is not pretty. I often meet, in airports, in the street and occasionally in embarrassing situations, MIT alumni who have taken one or more courses from me. Most of the time they admit that they have forgotten the subject of the course, and all the mathematics I thought I had taught them. However, they will gladly recall some joke, some anecdote, some quirk, some side remark, or some mistake I made.”

I took 18.02 from Rota in my very first semester. What I remember was what a nice person he was.

I should read this once a year. Now, internet, find allthe threads where I have made this comment, and book adequate time on my calendar. Preferably injury of each year.

The instructors at my elementary school used to make jokes about how they would all eventually contract bronchitis or TB from breathing in so much chalk dust over the course of their careers.

mine was, rising in 96, is that self taught stuff takes a while to understand, even if you do not understand

That sentence must take a while to understand.

My new word for the day: incunabulum

Subtle in the context: not just a "testimony of knowledge in a priceless form", but also an "in-the-cradle" ('incunabulum' - the term conveys "immaturity"), a relic of old times predating current state-of-the-art practice (the printing press). Both sides of value are in a museum piece.

> Blackboard Technique

Use Whiteboard. Worst teaching experiences in my life have featured blackboards. Ooh that scree of the chalk and the eraser that does no such thing.

Mind you, I haVE bad experiences with whiteboards too, particulary when the previous user defaced the board with non-whiteboard markers

Agreed, but we'd better zip up our flame proof suits before the chalk fans arrive. Look, I appreciate dark mode as much as the next guy and the chalk bouncing trick is super slick, but my god, the sound.

My primary school teachers liked to joke how they’d all die of bronchitis or tuberculosis from inhaling all that chalk dust over the years.

I remember my teachers, quite distinctly, saying the same. In fact I can still visualize the way they wrote on blackboard, opened the books and asked questions. Teachers were useful because they solved our questions when we couldn't find the answer.

I remember my skinny, somewhat pinched in-her-late 50’s calculus teacher drawing perfect huge circles on the blackboard in less than a second, using her double-jointed shoulder as the pivot. I had been warned about this by my buddy who hah had her for trig.

Maybe irreverent here but a permanent marker used on a whiteboard can be erased by a dry erase marker, it's basically magic

this was before whiteboards were commonplace i guess . whiteboards are better but i still see chalkboards in lectures today.

Sounds like crummy chalk -- a good blackboard with some chalk is heaven for me. Whiteboards are so sterile.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PhNUjg9X4g8

I will never miss whacking the erasers to remove the chalk dust in the morning as a child or the screech of chalk.

The “dust” from a whiteboard is worse, imo. And I used to like clapping the erasers!

A proper blackboard with proper chalk, such as Hagoromo chalk, is far superior to and cleaner than the best whiteboard.

In general, even non-Hagoromo chalk can be brushed or washed off, unlike dry erase marker dust that gets on everything and can stain. Also, I personally dislike the lack of friction when writing with dry erase markers.

I don’t know why but I find the chalk-on-a-blackboard in the MIT courseware lectures on algorithms so satisfying.

This is also my favorite one I’ve seen so far: https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/6-006-introduction-to-algorithms...

My experience is that whiteboards are the worst, because checking that the markers work properly is almost never done before the course.

Also they tend to be much smaller for some reason.

> My late friend Stan Ulam used to remark that his life was sharply divided into two halves. In the first half, he was always the youngest person in the group; in the second half, he was always the oldest. There was no transitional period. I now realize how right he was. The etiquette of old age does not seem to have been written up, and we have to learn it the hard way. It depends on a basic realization, which takes time to adjust to. You must realize that, after reaching a certain age, you are no longer viewed as a person. You become an institution, and you are treated the way institutions are treated. You are expected to behave like a piece of period furniture, an architectural landmark, or an incunabulum.

This was unexpectedly accurate.

>>10 Be prepared for old age

Like my dad adviced me.

As you age worry only about four things: Health, Relationships, Side income and Free time. Forget about career, accolades, titles, awards or recognitions, nothing is really remembered in this world where kids can't remember their parent's birthday or what they had in dinner yesterday.

Then why side income? If you're not going to worry about your career, why worry about side income?

The side hustle gives you optionality, so you don’t have to worry about your career so much. Just a guess.

The point is by the time you reach mid 40s, ensure you don't have to depend on a salary to run a family.

What's the reasoning for this strategy? Is the idea that it's harder to retain a salary job if your older (I'm assuming because you are likely more expensive and a target for redundancy)?

For a lot of us, the work we do is meaningless and takes us away from what we would enjoy doing with our limited remaining years. It might be a good strategy to find meaningful work but it's unlikely to compare favorably to spending time with ones family (for example).

This only works if you can afford it, of course.

That advice more and more doesn't work in this day and age. Though it's a good goal, just not that achievable

Side income is what sets you up for retirement. Generally, without a side income, you can't retire or stay retired. I don't suppose I have to explain why retirement is something of growing concern as you age.

Depending on where you live, the government may provide you a side income after a certain age (mid-60s, commonly), but often it is well below what one needs for their preferred standard of living, so one's own side income remains important to many.

For what it is worth, this is more typically referred to as investing, but not all investments successfully return the all important income, so the distinction does matter here.

Unless you work for the government. I fell for the free enterprise shtick, hook, line, and sinker, but everyone with a good government job did better than me. I’m talking, $150k to $200k PENSIONS in two cases. Even the divorced secretary of my thesis advisor at Berkeley did better!

I’m not complaining, I did fine. But by going into private enterprise, I gave up the ability to tax the American people directly for my sustenance. I didn’t understand that.

Assuming the things you don't worry about are things you got in the bag, things you don't need to worry about because they're a given

If you cannot see your legacy, then why do anything. What difference does it make if others don't remember if you cannot witness it anyway. I understand the part about family and relationships, but success sure feels good too even if no one cares after you are dead.

> If you cannot see your legacy, then why do anything. What difference does it make if others don't remember if you cannot witness it anyway.

Many people want to feel that their life was important & meaningful, and having a legacy fulfills that desire. Even though they don't get to experience their legacy first-hand, simply knowing they will have a legacy increases their self-esteem and well-being while they're living. It's this same desire to be important & meaningful that likely contributes to 'success' feeling good to you.

The legacy that matters is not the plastic cube engraved to commemorate you winning the 2021 Q3 Mid-Atlantic Region Corporate Synergy award.

I'm staring at one of these on my desk as I type this, and it took me a solid minute to even remember what I won it for. Everybody involved, including the VP who handed to it me and the product it was for, is long gone.

> success sure feels good too even if no one cares after you are dead.

Success is nice, but too often it comes at great cost. How many successful people's lives are essentially barren wastelands, because they had to move too many times, had to work ultra hard for years on stuff they don't particularly enjoy, had neglected friends and family and/or health. Not to mention that many of them, after attaining success, have learned that it doesn't matter all that much to them, and they'd rather have a full and balanced life instead (or, even worse, they feel bad but can't even articulate why - they haven't reach the necessary level of self-awareness) - only now it's too late for that.

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