Understand How It Works | Hacker News Reader

Understand How It Works

martinrue.com

37 pointsmartinrue12 comments

Please, please increase the contrast on your site. Gray on barely-lighter-gray is really tough to read.

Thanks, I'll try to make it a bit more readable.

The font is completely unreadable on win/chrome (for example, 'e' has the horizontal line missing at default font size).

same on win/opera

Not to mention the mobile version literally only allows one word of text per line...I'm on an iPhone5 if that helps, but the sidebar is...over zealous, should we say

Understand how contrast works? :P

My dad gave me a similar advice too. Turns out this advice works with my personality: everything can be considered a puzzle and I have great fun working things out.

I like figuring things out to understand them. Allows me to extrapolate on them and make fairly okay/spot on predictions. Works well on most fields from math to computer science. Doesn't work as well when you try to apply this on human beings.

That I think is where I come into a lot of difficulty when interacting with humans. Trying to understand humans is not like trying to understand machine parts of math theorems. You cannot take them apart. I still have no idea how to understand how humans work

There's a problem when you apply this to software development. There are so many frameworks and APIs out there that it's impossible to truly learn them all (to the point that you truly understand them as opposed to just knowing how to use them), and they are generally superceded in a few years by the next best thing anyway.

I used to spend time looking through the code of open source projects to understand quirks or things I didn't fully understand, but the pressures of work mean that new libraries just don't get the attention they deserve. Hence, you end up in a rather depressing best-guess approach when using new libs, and revert to google/StackOverflow if you have a problem.

I much prefer to fully understand things.

This isn't a very helpful advice. We always understand how it works. Our understanding is often superficial and even wrong but nevertheless sufficient more often than not.

I honestly don't like this advice.

Remembering stuff is what gives you the tools to understand - you simply can't understand without a large collection of facts. Facts aren't sufficient, but they are necessary. Trying to jump over the "knowing stuff" phase leads to a very low quality understanding.

There are, however, some elements of knowledge that are more important than others - and it's often important in learning to check that you actually understand something on which stuff is later being based rather than just forging ahead and hoping it all works out okay.

Besides, the advice was never to just remember. You know? Ask questions, build on your current understanding - if that requires you to go and learn more facts, go do that. It's a question-based method of learning.

Makes sense to me anyway - how I learn most of the stuff I do :/

Apologies for the poor design, I'm working on improving it. The posts are Markdown and can be read directly on GitHub if you're struggling with my awesome design.

https://github.com/martinrue/martinrue.com/blob/master/posts...

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