jodooshi

>boredom is actually a crucial tool for making our lives happier, more productive, and more creative. -Gretchen Rubin

It reminds me of a book I read last year: Bored and Brilliant[1].

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Bored-Brilliant-Spacing-Productive-Cr...

> People laughed at Seymour Papert in the 1960s, more than half a century ago, when he vividly talked about children using computers as instruments for learning and for enhancing creativity, innovation, and "concretizing" computational thinking.[1]

[1] http://papert.org/

> ...our intelligence resides not in individual brains but in the collective mind. To function, individuals rely not only on knowledge that is stored within our skulls but also on knowledge stored elsewhere, be it in our bodies, in the environment or especially in other people. Put together, human thought is incredibly impressive, but at its deepest level it never belongs to any individual alone. [1]

[1] The Knowledge Illusion: Why We Never Think Alone https://www.amazon.com/Knowledge-Illusion-Never-Think-Alone/...

I think what you said is true. But the main point implied here but I didn't mentioned is the mindset or competence is quite different between programming competition & real work. After all, being good on the job depends more on reflection, going slowly, making things right. ;-)

Being good at programming competitions correlates negatively with being good on the job - Peter Norvig

http://www.catonmat.net/blog/programming-competitions-work-p...

> monads aren’t actually all that complicated. In fact, most of the experienced functional programmers I’ve met consider them downright simple. It’s just that newcomers often have a really hard time trying to figure out what exactly monads even are... A lot of intermediate-to-advanced functional programmers have taken it upon themselves to write monad tutorials... But for the most part, these tutorials never seem to work.

Why is that? Locked doors, headaches, and intellectual need: https://mkremins.github.io/blog/doors-headaches-intellectual... :-)

“Any error may vitiate the entire output of the device. For the recognition and correction of such malfunctions intelligent human intervention will in general be necessary.”

— John von Neumann, First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC, 1945

Perhaps no advantage, but it's a good thing. As in the CPU market, there are Intel, AMD, even another architecture alternatives, eg. ARM. It's just an analogy. :-)

TL.DR: Discovery is curiosity’s product; everything else, including immeasurable economic value, follows.

TL.DR :-)

The best reason to start a company is that you are obsessed with solving a problem-- there is some pressing issue that you need to fix, or some product that you need to exist. Don't chase hot new technologies or perceived market opportunities (especially not as a 21-year-old newbie to the real-world market). The road to a successful startup is so long and hard that, without insane levels of conviction, most will fail. Don't start a company for the sake of starting a company-- start one because you honestly believe that you have to.

Paul's essay "How You Know[1]" has a great analogy about subconscious mind：

“Reading and experience train your model of the world. And even if you forget the experience or what you read, its effect on your model of the world persists. Your mind is like a compiled program you've lost the source of. It works, but you don't know why.”

[1]: http://www.paulgraham.com/know.html

圣诞快乐！

>People have a strong instinct not to disappoint a system that gives them so much ownership. A flat structure surfaces and amplifies this instinct.

That's human nature.