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Hacker News is basically slowly but surely converting me more into a technical person. When I came here first, I mostly looked at the psychological articles and
by mettamage 8y ago
Hacker News is basically slowly but surely converting me more into a technical person. When I came here first, I mostly looked at the psychological articles and some web articles. But when I felt a bit more focused and bold I'd go for more technical articles. I have been doing this ever since and I have noticed there are two types of technical articles I really like:
1. any computer graphics reverse engineer article, or reverse engineering regarding a game console, or the posts about Dolphin the gamecube emulator.
2. any security article. Especially about exploits or vulnerabilities.
I was surprised at how well I understood them. But I think in part it has to do with that I sometimes venture out and expand my comfort zone. I keep on expanding my comfort zone through Hacker News, it really supplemented my computer science education quite well.
I also use it a lot as a search engine to find high quality educational content. All those upvotes matter. And if the upvotes don't matter -- the educational resource is quite bad -- then there's always some insightful comment about a good resource. I learned a thing or two about deep learning this way and how it relates to topology. I've never read anything about topology before! That's just really cool that some resources can give you a basic intuition about it.
- spondyl 8y agoIt's surprising what you can learn by osmosis! You don't necessarily have to understand everything but you absorb over time, just like how children learn their first language I suppose
- aequitas 8y agoI found that following humor blogs about certain specialist area's also help a lot with the osmosis. One example is DBAreactions. I'm Dev/Ops, so naturally I have to touch on DBA tasks but not enough to get fully involved in the field. Following the humor blog and sometimes stumbling upon a joke I don't get tells me there is some knowledge that must be so common (ie important) in that field that I miss. So then a task arises for me to learn to laugh at the joke.
- xd1936 8y ago100% this. Steeping your brain in high-level and advanced thinking slowly but surely teaches you how to think in new ways, even if you don't absorb and comprehend it all at a detailed level.
- shawn 8y agoYou'd like this then: https://medium.com/webmr/n64-vr-with-javascript-e188de42ced5 https://medium.com/webmr/n64-vr-with-javascript-e188de42ced5 N64 games in VR with JS.
- grepthisab 8y agoReally interesting point. Several years ago I started browsing out of some cargo cult mentality (everyone cool is browsing, I should too) and found a handful of interesting articles. But many titles looked impenetrable or like gibberish (or both). Slowly over the years I've gained enough familiarity with a varied subject matter that I recognize and understand what everything will likely be about, and can dive into many technical articles that I couldn't before. Of course, many are still way over my head. I've also found that the comments give me some ground truth on articles, whether they're good or not, and what points the article made that don't hold up in the real world or are super opinionated.