Ask HN: What simple facts have you learned surprisingly late in life? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What simple facts have you learned surprisingly late in life?

41 pointsSeanAnderson82 comments

I'm 33. I just learned, today, that there is no such thing as a paprika plant and that paprika spice is simply dried, ground bell/mild peppers. It seems relatively obvious in hindsight given that I'd never seen or heard of a paprika plant, but the fact I'm learning this so late in life is a bit staggering.

It got me wondering - what other simple facts slip by us sometimes until the obvious is made apparent?

For fun, a few others I've had occur over the years:

- I thought "having allergies" and "being allergic to something" were entirely distinct concepts. The former is a non-lethal, relatively mild inconvenience experienced seasonally by many. The latter is "I die if I eat that crab." The extreme differences in effects and differences in how people spoke about these words caused me to assume they were entirely distinct concepts until my early 20s.

- I did not realize that the musical artist "Flo Rida" (pronounced Flow Rye-Duh) was, you know, referencing the state, until someone pointed it out to me. It's much more apparent when written :)

relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/1053/

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You don't know what other people are thinking, and they don't know what you are thinking.

If you make yourself fat and then lose weight you will have excess skin.

Walking 3 miles a day is life changing.

Paying your mortgage off can leave a sense of emptiness, like what next?

If you have 3 people in your life actively looking out for your interests you are very fortunate

It rains more in the afternoon

When you ask people hard maths questions their pupils dilate

Going out with your wife for dessert on a Friday night after 30 years of marriage is better than tech

> Paying your mortgage off can leave a sense of emptiness, like what next?

It didn't leave me with "what's next" but it was very anti-climatic for me. I worked a shit-ton of over time and a 2nd job to make extra payments. We were dumping everything into our mortgage. I looked forward each month tracking where we were and where we would be in 1-month, 6-months and a year out. I looked forward to writing that last check. And then the day came and there were no balloons or ticker-tape parades. The next day the sun rose in the east and set in the west. Weird!

> Paying your mortgage off can leave a sense of emptiness, like what next?

Months away from this. Obviously each to their own, but I think I'll have a sense of achievement, security, and relief once it's gone. Due to sacrifices I've made we've managed to pay off a 25y mortgage in a little under 12y. I can't wait to be debt free and not at the mercy of bank interest rates and economic disasters. I can then start putting more aside for my kids.

Agreed, and this is what I did too. You just don't know how much a space it feels in your thinking and purpose until it is gone. I imagine their may be a cautionary tale in there about enjoying today.

Why though? It would make more sense to keep lending at 2-ish% and making 8 in the market just throwing it in the S&P. The spread is 6 pts or more on average.

>You don't know what other people are thinking, and they don't know what you are thinking.

This is not absolute and you have to be careful with the interpretation.

"Intuition/Gut Feeling" (which is a successful evolutionary trait and part of our "Animal Brains") comes into play here and should never be disregarded, particularly when it comes to a sense of uneasiness/danger with other people/environment.

Could you elaborate on the walking part?

I lost 84lbs over the last year walking 3 miles every day and changing my diet. It takes me about 45 minutes to walk 3 miles. The walk also helps me to burn through my thoughts/feelings.

I eat a lot of healthy stuff now like porridge, vegetables and fruit. My dinners haven't really changed. Like a child I have ice cream every night. A fancy dessert once or twice a week. I don't eat after dinner.

Experience has taught me you don't have to train like Rocky if you want to get fit. You train like Rocky if your job involves people trying to beat you up.

There are a bunch of studies showing various risks dropping with daily walking.

fitbit like device manufacturers have pushed various numbers, but studies seem lately seem to be floating in the 9k steps a day region as to where the benefits stop

That there was basically no spicy food in the Old World before Columbus. All the heat in South Asian and Southeast Asian cooking comes from chili peppers imported from the New World. The spiciest thing the Old World had to offer was something called long pepper which is like black pepper with a little more kick.

Horseradish may be a counterexample.

Horseradish is spicy in the same sense as garlic is spicy, which is very unlike peppers.

It took me around 25 years to figure out that the piece of clothing we call in french a "pullover" (yes, say that with a strong french accent) is actually an English word describing how you physically put on the piece of clothing.

It's hard to describe how much this felt like a french word for all this time. To be honest, I even thought it was local jargon... We typically call it a "pull". Everyone does it, it's the word.

Oh, nice.

On french words I got way too late, there is the fact that "Gendarme" (a kind of policeman) is "gens d'arme" (people of weapon)

And also, thinking about the word "Breakfast", as in "Breaking the fast", I realize that the french "Déjeuner" is also literally "Dé - jeûner".

My favorite French word is Mortgage. Funnily enough this is the word used in English but not in French. The French have a separate word for a loan backed by property - Hypotheque.

My guess is that the reason for this is that the original French word hits too close to home. Mort-Gage literally means Death Pledge.

Oh...

Well, took me 34 years for this one I guess -_-'

We take many words for granted. For example, it took decades for me to realize the Finnish word "maailma" (the world) consists of words "maa" (earth) and "ilma" (air).

Opossums can grunt like pigs. I thought I had a pig living in my yard, because I heard grunts and squeaks (babies) passing by under my window one summer morning. Got a trailcam and it's a possum.

If you collect knives you will cut yourself more often, even if you are good at handling knives. The big-picture reason "more knives, more cuts" makes sense. But how does that work out in the little picture? This is due to specific reasons you probably don't anticipate until you have some hindsight.

If you can imagine it, you can probably build it, do it, design it, or construct it somehow. I never realized how pessimistic I was about this concept until someone said "it doesn't have to be this way" and it was like a huge lightbulb went off and I sat there with my mouth hanging open. Basically, nothing has to be that way. Some things will _probably_ be a certain way. But confusing those two principles propagates lots of really unfortunate stuff in our world, because we think "reality" is formed by the latter, and basically give up or don't try anything new.

Eating hard breath mints can break your teeth. Huh? And also: Duh!

Spinach is healthy. It can also send you to the ER with oxalate issues like kidney stones. You can be a skinny green-diet superstar and spinach, almonds, etc. will absolutely stab you in the back.

You can lose tons of weight while eating boxes of candy bars. People will warn you not to do that, but there are easy workarounds for all of their concerns.

Pickle juice can hydrate you. But it can also destroy you in one of the most comical ways possible.

That's all I got for now

> You can lose tons of weight while eating boxes of candy bars.

...how?

Burn more calories than you consume. There was a professor (Mark Haub) who only ate junk food for a period as a self experiment and lost a significant amount of weight simply by calorie restriction.

> Pickle juice can hydrate you. But it can also destroy you in one of the most comical ways possible.

Please, elaborate

It's surprisingly hard to change other people's minds, and probably easier to have your own certainties confronted and rebutted.

Basically, belief in a given world view, religion, or even something apparently (mis)fact based like a belief against AGW is not grounded in facts but is something else: you venture into rocky waters thinking logic and proof will change that belief. People hang onto their beliefs remarkably strongly, evidence and argument not withstanding.

You cannot change other people's minds since it will always be perceived as a direct blow to their self-ascribed Identity/Ego; Their Beliefs are Who they are.

The best one can do is to give them the information/advice, appeal to authority, bombard them with data and leave them be. They will change themselves once they start thinking on their own in their own time frame and/or circumstances force them to realize the folly of their beliefs (both are optional).

People change their minds when they are alone. That's why it's better to be calm than to be aggro when arguing.

I just learned from Wikipedia (via HackerNews) that flossing isn't really proven to be that beneficial. Blew my mind. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dental_floss

I think this is one of those things that "isn't really proven" because it's obvious to the ones who do it, and the ones who don't feel better pushing the idea it's not proven.

I'm a very scientifically minded person, but I'm old enough to be able to confidently make my own decisions in some situations where "it isn't really proven".

Tell you what, stop flossing. When you get a really bad breath floss, and smell the bits that you find between your teeth. That's what rotting food smells like. Now, if I don't want rotting food in my living room, I certainly don't want it inside my mouth. I don't really need a scientist to make the call for me here.

Average intelligence is actually low intelligence - if it wasn't, we wouldn't have idiots needlessly starting wars, soldiers would recognise vanity or pride orders in the guise of nationalism instead of real threat and not risk their health (CF Russia, or passing out at Queen's funeral) advertising and the herd effect would be less effective, as would politicians' lies.

Politicians seem to be generally worse for this probably because of high visibility making it appear so, e.g top down economics doesn't work (https://pudding.cool/2022/12/yard-sale/), and recently in the UK they believe supply side inflation problems can be fixed by making people spend more on their mortgages/rent (vis-a-vis interest rates).

All that's done is make the lower earners struggle to buy food and heat their homes, whilst civil servants (and similar) strike as inflation based pay rises for them are non existent or are deliberately not using the measure calculated using house prices (CF. accusations against gov. of mix and match inflationary measures)

I think my issue with this is that the main idea is that intelligence is the determiner on where or not any of these those can happen when it’s far from the truth. Intelligent people (whatever that means) can also fall victim to any of these. Having a PhD in Quantum Physics doesn’t mean you’re immune to radicalization.

> Average intelligence is actually low intelligence - if it wasn't, we wouldn't have idiots needlessly starting wars

My guess is that political decisions result less from either lack or surplus of intelligence but from the presence or absence of trait psychopathy and the presence or absence of a moral centre.

This week I learned that a 3% credit card fee is a similar cost to offering 30 day terms on B2B transactions of you have to borrow from the bank to cover it. Only you get better cash flow and customers can get rewards.

And thanks to this post today I learned there is no such thing as a paprika plant. I'm 38...

Life is fair, you need to consider whether your actions failed because you were trying to improve yourself within a failing system. Change your env not only yourself.

Don't hear what they say, hear what they do.

Health first, including mental.

Those that achieved too much are outliers of those that made crazy plans. A bad strategy for the general population, many thousands have failed so that you get to see the celebrity. A badly biased sample on which to base your life strategy.

Choose boring for the important stuff and people in your life

Set expectations and boundaries for yourself and others

Most death bed wish lists have as a top item "I should have worked less"

You are working to make money, expecting to like is is self entitlement or self delusion

Read the news, read history, read psychology.

Inspire your kids, give them non individualistic principles. Easiest way to achieve success and happiness is in a positive and down to earth group / family.

Nothing is forever, effort is the reverse of entropy

Talk to your parents kid, they are soon leaving.

Most of these are great. Disagree on "read the news" though.

I've been news-free for about 5 years now. Not once have I ever regretted it.

You are saying this on a news site.

>Life is fair

No. That said, you do have some control over your "local maxima/minima" and hence the need for "continuous Self-Effort".

>give them non individualistic principles

Bad idea. They should be built up as "Individuals" within a "Larger Group" which they choose to belong to. This is the only way to teach them to think for themselves and not be a "groupie".

It feels weird to go from “we call the fruiting body a different word from the spice that is made from it” to “this plant doesn’t exist”

I feel a more accurate wording would be “I learned that paprika and bell peppers are actually words for different forms of the same fruit originating from one plant opposed to two totally different plants”.

to defend my crazy rambling at least a bit, in german bell peppers and the spice made from them are both called ‘Paprika’ which, as a native speaker, could be where this sense of “this feels wrong” stems for me.

From other side in language where there is no bell pepper. That paprika or bell pepper is well a pepper. Like a chili pepper. That then are technically paprikas at some level.

To continue the weird world of peppers or peppercorns. Sichuan peppercorn is different thing. But that the black, white, green and red are from same fruit(also fact that peppercorn is a fruit) differently prepared and not different cultivars for example.

Hmm, now leads to open question. Can you put peppercorn in your fruit salad with tomatoe?

> Hmm, now leads to open question. Can you put peppercorn in your fruit salad with tomatoe?

...Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could that they didn't stop to think if they should.

That fruit salad is called salsa.

I thought "prurient" meant special or keen, rather than sexual. I remember talking about my "prurient interests" in animal behavior, religion, indigenous cultures, virology etc.

I am mortified.

Ha, Ha, Ha!

This is the first LOL-worthy comment that i have read on HN.

For years I read the word “Albeit” in my head as the sound “al-bite” and did not realise that other people were reading it as “all be it”. (I thought that they were reading something _written_ as “all be it”.) Clearly “albeit” is a contracted form of “all be it”, but my brain hadn’t clicked to this.

I've learnt that it's OK not to succeed on the first try. It's not about the destination, it's about the journey. As long as you're getting closer to your goal, you're on the right track. But you don't usually get there right away.

I used to give up as soon as I failed.

The key here is to always keep one's "Spirits Up" i.e. maintain a "Indomitable Spirit" come what may.

A study of mental techniques from martial arts texts even if one does not necessarily practice martial arts (though the practice makes understanding quicker) would be very helpful in developing attitudes/behaviour to build up our fortitude in the face of adversity.

Yep, came here to state this as well and was the 1st thing that popped in my head when I read the question.

Ponies are not baby horses, they're a breed of horse.

"righty tighty lefty loosey" is context-specific. The few drinks I've had from Japan opened the other way. Also pressure regulators for flammable gasses.

Believe half of what you read and none of what you hear. I heard this very young but consistently fail to put it into practice. Gotten a little better over time, though.

The immaculate conception was (according to catholic doctrine) the conception of Mary, not Jesus.

When somebody invites you to an argument, you are not obligated to accept.

[Tongue map](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tongue_map) is total nonsense, although we do have different flavor receptors (like rods and cones for the retina) they're all spread out everywhere.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Vowel_Shift. Craziest thing I've ever heard.

People are people. That person you worship? A person. That person you hate? A person. They have hopes, dreams, insecurities, guilty passions, they make mistakes, and so on. Usually people bring this up when somebody does something terrible, but it can go any direction.

Stuffing data into dictionaries and passing it along many functions is much easier than writing a class to deal with the same.

hard disagree. Mistyped a name? with classes you get an error on compile time. Dictionaries? only on runtime.

plus, you won't need to remember every field because your editor can autocomplete it for you

There is more than one language out there

“Type safe dictionary” is just another way of saying “object”

No it's not. Dictionaries are accessed by key whereas objects are accessed by field (which is a high level way of representing an offset in memory). So one of those two is at least 10x faster than the other.

please show a language whose HashMap type does compile-time checking. I am actually interested.

I just learned the other day that squirrels make nests in trees.

Where did you think they slept?

I don't know, where do rats and mice and other rodents sleep?

I grew up around peanuts. My grandparents had a big peanut plantation at their country house, so they always had tons of peanuts at home.

The first time I took my wife (then girlfriend) to visit them, they were having peanuts in the shell — by cracking the shell open and eating them.

My wife, looking very puzzled and intrigued, asked my grandfather. “What is that?”, to which he replied “Uh… peanuts?”. Oh how we laughed.

She was 20 years old at the time and didn’t know peanuts came from the shell, she’d have only seen them without it.

I still remember my grandfathers smile, he had never met anyone that didn’t “know peanuts”. He found it so funny. I miss him.

Learn from those much less experienced than you in the workplace, such as interns.

As they are new and learning they are often more receptive and tend to pick up new practices you may discount.

Whilst they may not be as good as you at your job now, the new practices may eventually replace your own so get in on the ground floor. CF. docker containers Vs "monolithic" 3 tier systems, nosql Vs SQL DBs, newer programming languages, all happened to me in the last 10 years, and I'm thankful I had the foresight to learn from them.

Malapropism - not the phenomenon itself, but its name which I finally remembered from watching the movie Glass Onion.

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

There are peppers that are commonly used for paprika.

It's like growing different varieties of pea for mange tout or sugar snap. So you aren't that wrong.

It took me far too long to realise that the word spelled segue and the word pronounced Segway were one and the same!

Today I learnt that salt raises the boiling temperature of water. I knew it lowered the freezing point but I never considered it might also change the boiling point.

It does, but hardly worth noting.

"So yes, salt increases the boiling temperature, but not by very much. If you add 20 grams of salt to five litres of water, instead of boiling at 100° C, it’ll boil at 100.04° C."

Ref: https://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2007/04/12/1894612.h...!

Interaction between Water and Salt is fascinating: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-do-we-put-sal...

This property is really helpful in making eggs using microwave. Take a mug of water, add salt, crack an egg and pour it in. Stick this in the microwave, the egg gets boiled perfectly, because the salt slows down the boiling point.

Only after breaking my right arm (for the second time) - the humerus bone - did I connect the dots as to why it's called "the funny bone".

I was in my mid-20s :-)

The funny bone is the actually the ulnar nerve. I think it’s more-likely called the “funny bone” because when you hit your elbow just right (/just wrong), the ulnar nerve is directly stimulated, resulting in a weird tingling / burning / electricity sensation across the entire forearm. Which feels funny.

Yes, that is the alternative theory behind the name too. Both are equally valid.

Life is what you make it, good things happen to good people.

Good things happen to all people, and also the opposite.

Good things happen to people with good attitudes.

Bad things happen to people with bad attitudes.

It was the same thing.

No. I will rephrase them as;

People with Good Attitudes perceive most things happening to them as "Good Things".

People with Bad Attitudes perceive most things happening to them as "Bad Things".

That's different from what I said.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34564642

The way you phrased it doesn’t make clear that the SAME thing is interpreted differently by both people. The two statements are not logically equivalent.

Perception is reality

... Only for the Perceiver.

In as much as there is a Reality outside of the Perceiver, distinct and separate, he would need to adjust his perception in order to avoid cognitive dissonance and live in the "real world".

I am the perceiver, so checks out Also, perception is 9/10 of the law

I am not sure whether you understood my comment in the way intended.

Reality exists distinct and separate from the Perceiver's unique Perception of it (which exists only at a point in Time and might change). Therefore he would need to validate his Perception so that it is in sync with Reality or suffer consequences. Perception cannot be conflated with Reality.

This is why platitudes like "Good Things happen to Good People etc." are meaningless. Having a good attitude helps in dealing with bad things but does not change its essential characteristics.

That's exactly it. Saying "good things happen to good people" to yourself over and over throughout your life helps many people to have and maintain a good attitude. So it does have an effect.

Not what i meant at all :-)

To elaborate;

Having a good attitude helps in dealing with bad things in the short term only and many times not at all and one would still need to face up to "reality" and change the "objective bad things" outside of our perception.

Attitudes are basically a coping mechanism (short term and context specific) and not a solution to "The Problem".

As an example, no amount of "Good Thoughts and Good Attitudes" is going to help a starving person deal with the reality of figuring out how to feed himself.

I know it's not what you meant, I'm trying to get you to open your mind.

We are social beings. So imagine two starving people, one has a good attitude, one doesn't. The one with the good attitude is more likely to be admitted and kept in the good graces of a social network that helps them when starving, the other is not. So the good attitude helps in this thought experiment. The issue with your thought experiment is that it takes each man as an island.

We don't exist in a vacuum, we are not islands.

Attitudes only help in oiling the Social Machinery and is not an excuse to live in "Fantasy Land". That is why we have phrases like "Toxic Positivity", "Irrational Exuberance (in general)" etc. to characterize "feel good" platitudes taken too far. One cannot escape the effects of a distinct and separate "Reality".

Your take on my example does not make sense. In extreme cases like starvation, destitution, homelessness etc. aid workers don't rank the needy on a "attitude scale"; they simply provide the needed services to alleviate immediate suffering in order of priority if applicable.

I think you are trying to argue the inarguable. The reason i feel so strongly about these kinds of platitudes is because they have a) not solved the problem b) caused more harm then good due to wrong interpretations and applications.

As another direct example from HN threads; many people are disheartened because of not being able to land a job in spite of having gone through hundreds of applications and interviews. Here again it is far more important to help them evaluate themselves dispassionately (eg. lack of needed skills, bad communication, non-existent networking etc.) vis-a-vis the competition/market needs/etc. in a clear-eyed manner than just asking them to "be positive" and leaving them with a pat on the back. You need Actionable items and not merely Advice.

First part is partially correct (there is a huge element of Chance involved), Second part is wrong.

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