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Comment by medler | Hacker News Reader

This essay holds a special place in my heart, since I first read it as a teenager when I was just starting to learn to code.

Re-reading it now, I was surprised to see references to Malcom Gladwell, since I didn’t remember Outliers becoming a thing until much later. Then when I saw the reference to Ratatouille, I realized the article had been updated since its posting in 1998. The original is still available on archive and is significantly shorter: https://web.archive.org/web/19980206223800/https://norvig.co... Respect to Peter Norvig for continuing to edit his posts over the years.

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I resent Gladwell to this day, possibly because I was assigned to read him in high school. He is quoted too much -- the 10,000 hours thing is just a meme at this point, for me anyway.

Not to mention the whole Igon Value Problem.

How can AI be unethical? There's eigen-values everywhere!

That sentence shocked me. It was the last Gladwell sentence I read.

He’s really just the physical world manifestation of the idea that “For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.”

Oh I agree 100%, the 10,000 hours thing is a cliché and the popular interpretation that 10,000 hours of an activity equals mastery has been throughly debunked. I roll my eyes whenever I see it mentioned.

I’m giving Norvig a pass here because I don’t remember it being such a cliché in 2008, and because I appreciate the point he’s making about the importance of practice. (Early in my programming education I often felt that I might just not be cut out for programming, and I wish more articles at the time had emphasized that it takes a lot of practice to become a good programmer).

The breaking point for me was when someone linked me to his podcast where it's clear that he either hasn't done much diligence or is obviously ignoring information to tell a better story. It's painful and made me really question anything he puts into his books.

I can see myself now, reading this in the university library computer lab a decade ago. And now I've taught myself programming. The journey was much more difficult and winding than I was imagining it back then!

As someone who doesn't have a traditional CS background and is on a similar journey, I'd love to know: do you have any advice or insights to share?

To succeed takes 3,650 days. To give up only takes 1. Practice, practice, and practice some more.

before "outliers" there was "the tipping point" and "blink"

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