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Comment by WalterBright | Hacker News Reader

I have this issue myself. I was trained as a mechanical engineer, not a computer scientist, not a programmer. I'm pretty much self-taught as a programmer. I run into peculiar gaps in my knowledge that a formally educated computer scientist would consider basic knowledge.

One of the reasons Andrei Alexandrescu and I worked well together as a team designing D is that he had the formal training, and I had the practical experience. Our abilities complemented each other's.

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P.S. I once invented a concept, and proudly did a presentation on it. It was rudely brought to my attention that this was well known in computer science. Very, very embarrassing.

Which is funny because everyone and their mother in software development is eager to show off something that has existed since the '70s.

The phenomenon is so common in tech--something I, too, have experienced despite computer science having been my major--that it should practically just be a right of passage for software engineers.

What was the concept?

Sorry, it was too humiliating for me to bring up again :-/ It pains me to even think about it.

I'm pretty happy about "inventing caching", independently, all on my own as a teenager, some 40 years after it was actually being introduced.

I invented CSVs (and using them as a database!) as a teenager. I was really goddamn proud of myself.

I invented hook-loop when I was 8 years old only be told it was called crochet!

Here on HN you are among friends, my friend :)

Thanks for the kind words! But I just want to forget about that mistake.

This is literally how science works though.

Independent invention is a stronger data point than peer review, or even independent reproduction.

Congratulations on inventing the concept anyway.

Personally, I would not have bothered about their rudeness - although I know it's hard to totally ignore such comments.

I would be proud of myself, or at least be happy, for having invented the concept independently, more so if it was well known in computer science, because that indicates it had some utility.

I was pleased enough with my invention to what to do a presentation about it :-)

As a self-taught seamster who (re)invented the French seam, or as I call it, the Broom seam, I applaud you!

> I run into peculiar gaps in my knowledge that a formally educated computer scientist would consider basic knowledge

I do not believe such an issue is still a factor after the web and a billion education courses on computer science are available. Nowadays also with LLM's which will happily answer everything for you.

You still have to know what questions to ask to get a reasonable answer from LLMs, and you need to know enough about the topic to produce a correct prompt.

Yes, and you also have to be able to understand the LLM's answers, and to be able to distinguish correct answers from "hallucinations" (or AI slop), which is just an euphemism for mistakes or wrong answers made by them.

All of which implies that you need to know quite a bit about that topic (which you were asking the LLM about) in the first place, otherwise how can you distinguish right answers from wrong ones.

So lenkite's comment is not very useful or practical.

Access to free public libraries hasn't generated a lot of self-taught replacements for law school education, even though you can take the bar exam without a law degree.

Education has its place. It remains the most efficient method of ingesting large masses of well-organized information.

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