10 ms·

The more you learn, the faster you can learn

307 points by pranaygp 7y ago

kylek 7y ago
>> , scaled a botnet of over 2,000 bots that made money from a popular trivia game, Did this make anyone else flinch? edit: I do want to comment on the Feynman Technique linked in the article. I've never actually written concepts down as explained, but it's very close to how I _actually_ learn (or at least, feel confident in my knowledge). If I can't explain something in plain language, there's a good chance I've gaps. The steps listed are pretty succinct - going to have to give it a try!
- downandout 7y ago
  I wouldn't say it made me flinch, but that is not a throwaway line. It deserves some additional, I'm sure quite interesting, explanation. But I believe he is referring to HQ, and there have been other write-ups on HN about how to automate beating it.
  - pranaygp 7y ago
    I love telling this story, but that wasn't the point of the post
    - downandout 7y ago
      Fair enough. Out of curiosity, was this a big money maker for you? Like 5 or 6 figures?
    - samvher 7y ago
      At the end you mention you may have found a good resource to improve your writing. Which resource is that? It's something I want to get better at as well.
samplatt 7y ago
Work's firewall is coming up saying this site is malware :S
- pranaygp 7y ago
  Most probably because I haven't been able to setup HTTPS yet. I just moved my site to svbtle today (https://svbtle.com https://svbtle.com) and I'm still waiting for them to help with that
- leonidasv 7y ago
  You can read it using a "focused reader" service like Outline: https://outline.com/cvHmpU https://outline.com/cvHmpU
- deleted 7y ago
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NHQ 7y ago
This describes me pretty well. I'm a dedicated learner, and I think it's what I do best. I don't master topics. Even the information about the thing can be a distraction. It's about synthesizing info into your working knowledge. Everything is reference. CSS is a great example. Do I know everything about it, even after 10 years? Nope. But I know it well enough that a quick reference is all I need for any problem. Programming in general, too. Took me a minute to grok fundamental things (data types, functions, etc). I don't care what language I use, it's all one, plus syntax. I want to use other languages, for fun and synthesis.
- Rapzid 7y ago
  :D I found out the fun way this trait often doesn't fly in interviews when they ask about your best quality.. Scuttled a phone interview with a hiring manager at Cloudflare real fast and he condescendingly chortled that "Everyone says that". Thought I did an okay job rescuing the interview after that but.. Wasn't feeling the dude anyway after that so I guess the feeling was mutual :)
  - ct520 7y ago
    I agree. But I feel the people / company that recognize and appreciate your broad skill set is the place you want to be. I struggled a bit on this myself.
    - VvR-Ox 7y ago
      It's their loss and it's a huge reward seeing their faces when you touch something that becomes a really good business after they declined ;-)
- stan_rogers 7y ago
  "The determined Real Programmer can write FORTRAN programs in any language." - Ed Post, Real Programmers Don't Use Pascal, 1982. There is a hell of a lot more difference between the various programming languages than their syntax. Natural languages as well - you can render idiomatic English in any language, and if you don't care very much about getting your intended meaning across (and your listeners are both patient and fond of puzzles), you may well choose to do so. It may get you food and lodgings for the night. But the computing equivalent of getting by in a pidgin isn't quite the same thing as programming in the language you're using.
danenania 7y ago
I couldn’t agree more about finding the best resources. As with many other things in life, there are power law effects in how intelligent and knowledgeable experts are in their fields, and more importantly, how skilled they are at communicating what they know. The very best are orders of magnitude better than the average expert, and you will learn exponentially faster and better if you can find these people. This means being very discriminating—if you don’t find yourself highly enthusiastic to read/watch/listen to more of someone, you are much better off moving on quickly than trudging through without being truly inspired. It’s better to search broadly at first, then zero in when you feel that ‘click’. Unfortunately, most schools and universities take the exact opposite approach. While you can eventually get very deeply and thoroughly educated about a specific field via academia, it’s an incredibly inefficient way to learn.
- deleted 7y ago
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whatshisface 7y ago
Of course, some of these steps (like finding the best learning resource), can only be done once you're already an expert who knows what all of the resources are! There are also a lot of situational things, for example although you may have a preference between videos, documentation and example code, the best to learn from is usually whatever medium the best teacher decided to use.
- pranaygp 7y ago
  Experts usually know some great resources, but are often themselves your best resource if you have access to one. I definitely forgot to mention them, the people I worked with at Facebook and ZEIT are on that list. But when I wasn't working somewhere, I had to find my own resources and trust my own instincts. I didn't know who the best teachers were, so I had to decide for myself, what the best resource for me would be. Often, I got it wrong, but I got better and finding the diamonds in the rough.
chaboud 7y ago
“I left an important part out of the process above - how do you actually find the best resource. I don’t know. That said, I’ve gotten “lucky” enough times that I think I know how to optimize for finding it.” Pro tip: No, you don’t. I’m game to explain it over coffee to the author, who seems to be in the Bay Area, but this writing reads a lot like someone who just started to scratch the surface on abstract learning and metacognition while thinking that it’s a wildly new discovery. It’s hard to hear/read the reenforcing recitations of new-to-the-(speaker/author) concepts and not see it as a slow-motion replay of a common thought process, akin to sitting in Dolores park listening to musings on democracy and governance in the age of automation... thirty minutes after a batch of pot truffles has sold out... As a generalist/multi-whatever, let me say this: expert engineers hate the knows-enough-to-be-dangerous guy who thinks he’s god’s gift to learning that can just walk in and be conversant after reading one book. That guy is a pain in the ass know-it-all that spoils conversations, derails projects, and digs bottomless pits of technical debt. How do I know? I was that guy when I was younger, and I’m sure I drove people nuts. No doubt there are times when I’m still that guy, but I try to hold my tongue more now until I’m confident in what I know and openly disclose where I think I fall short. If you can’t take that mechanism for learning and flex it down to the bottom of the rabbit hole, or if you always fall back onto the crutch of relating a complex topic to a comfortable imperfect analogue, you’re aiming to be the engineer that gets handed non-critical work or the manager that nobody wants in a meeting... Or maybe a successful founder of some kick-ass mega unicorn... sigh... whatever. In the big companies (and Silicon Valley) I hear/see this type of thinking and self-congratulation all the time among engineers with 1-4 years of professional experience. On occasion, those engineers have the horsepower to back it up, but it’s rare. Some of that write-up resonates with how I’ve learned/worked over time, but I’d never write something so stridently confident. Me 20 years ago?
- satyanash 7y ago
  Given that software as a arena is a widely competitive and rapidly evolving one, you can never know if the person in front of you is an expert or not. In such a case, what has always helped me is to first remind myself to be humble and use this cheatsheet: * ask questions that probe your point of concern, instead of pointing out flaws. This allows the other person to reveal his expertise with a solution and also enlighten you in the process or admit their mistake. * Never claim to know everything. Always be cognizant of the fact that other people ("newer" people) will show you up. Always be willing to learn from anybody who makes a concise argument.
akhilcacharya 7y ago
I agree with the BFS strategy but I’ve never gotten good enough at anything to gain the respect of an SME.
- pranaygp 7y ago
  SME?
  - leetrout 7y ago
    Subject Matter Expert
  - akhilcacharya 7y ago
    Subject matter expert
  - cam8001 7y ago
    Subject Matter Expert, I think.
  - chaboud 7y ago
    Subject-matter expert. One critical way to become a better learner on a team (that is, a far less annoying learner) is to recognize when to ask a question of someone else and when to just Google/Portal/XPlore/etc it. Interactive mentors will be far more welcoming when they feel like you’ve earned the roadblock that you’re up against.
    - pranaygp 7y ago
      Great point! I've been called out for aggressively soliciting help
proverbialbunny 7y ago
I made a hobby out of exploring how learning works. The author is spot on. However, there are some tweaks worth considering: 1) The author proposes learning _everything_ under the sun, so that one has enough dependencies to learn new topics. This is like downloading most of the packages in aptitude to speed up builds. However, I prefer to go about it in a different way. I focus on patience and normalizing myself to long and deep build chains. Learning a light topic in a new domain can take hours, if not days, to understand it deep enough to successfully use it to learn other concepts. When there is something I need or want to know, but when I pull up Wikipedia and see a bunch of foreign vocabulary, I will create a dependency list of vocabulary, and learn everything I need to know to read that article and flawlessly understand it. If it is a new topic it can sometimes take a week of slow learning to quickly learn. It seems painfully slow, but it's learning a large chunk of a new domain in a week. This could be something a college class takes months to go over, so the rate is quite accelerated even if at the time it doesn't seem like it. Slow and steady really does win the race. 2) >I keep trying while following a breadth-first-search approach to domains and resources as described above. and >Stop. This is counter-intuitive, but unless you want to become a master at something (besides learning), you really just want to know everything at an intermediate level. When recursively learning prerequisite concepts, usually understanding 100% of every prerequisite concept is necessary. There are no short cuts. In this scenario a depth first search is ideal, finding the root and starting there. Likewise, a dependency chain of concepts is a chain of abstraction. When learning a prerequisite concept, no matter how abstract it is, it must be thought of as concrete. It must be understood as if it is concrete. This is the minimum bar to using a concept to build up other concepts. This is can be thought of as an intermediate level of understanding, but I suspect for most people this means mastery. Don't stop short. 3) What is learned will be forgotten within a couple of weeks, unless it a) has been pondered about a minimum of 6 seconds, usually by making up a story to describe it to yourself. The 6 second rule is a neurological limitation that is required to move the memory from short term to long term storage. And b) It is strongly beneficial for what is learned to leave the mind and come back into it on one way or another. This can happen by doing something with your hands, talking out loud about it to someone else, or note taking. This is important and without it details will be lost. I write in a condensed mind-map list like format for this reason. Likewise if I forget something or remember something wrong, I can go back with a ctrl+f and figure out what I did wrong. 4) Etymology is massively important when it comes to learning. The history of why the concept is called what it is called, as well as understanding why it was invented or how it was discovered. I try to visualize what the world was like before the thing I am learning existed and how things used to be done. This teaches me of it's power and when and why to use it. When etymology is done right, the mind will record the concept into spacial awareness which is the strongest and longest lasting kind of memory we have. There is a lot I could say, but by understanding where people are coming from, you can apply what technique is ideal for that specific task. Learning is no different. One can master it, and from that the gains are innumerable.
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aur09 7y ago
Relying on fast estimations is one of the most powerful aspects of the way our brains work. But applying the skill of finding and applying fast estimations exclusively to every topic--like reading SparkNotes over an original piece--is a good way to eventually know very little. Suppose any rate of decay in the things you retain. If your starting point is already small, losing any of it comes at a high cost. At least when pursuing mastery of a subject, you are repeatedly faced with new ways of understanding the basics, to the point that they are innate and automatic. You might forget small specifics which you can later find in your known references, but without mastery you might instead forget the basics--and relying on a reference for those basics means it's much less clear when they are aptly applied. I would hazard a guess that that's why people have always tended to master only one or a couple skills, but people congregate and work in complement with others who have mastery over other skills. The community is the entity with knowledge over many domains--not the individual who learns tons of surface material. And simultaneously, everyone does learn a little bit about a lot of topics from time to time. But that balance is important--so I wouldn't personally weight so heavily the cursory synthesis portion of it as OP did. -- Also, a little advice to OP. Drop some of the grandiose introduction. 100% of the links I clicked in the first paragraph were more disappointing than their descriptions led me to anticipate.
aronowb14 7y ago
Interesting post! It's almost exactly what I've found that has worked well for me. Putting in the three or four hours at the beginning of the process of learning something to find the best resources is essential. That being said, I do think the importance of mastering one or two things should not be overstated, and was kind of ignored in your post. Let me elaborate: for me my deepest skill has been 3D modeling and rendering: it's been about six years of pretty consistent practice, doing motion graphics, general modeling, animation, color theory, and really just trying to absorb all the knowledge I can about this specific passion. This process has been super useful for a couple reasons, and kind of worked to snap me out of the "generalist" learning mindset. For example, I've found the learning curve over time for 3D modeling is pretty generalizable to other skills I learn: because I've sunk so much time into it, and have had to push through plateaus, and grind over hills, and realize when I'm just coasting, whenever I am learning other things, I recognize the emotion swing and know roughly where in the learning process I am. Similarly, the fluency I have with my 3D modeling tools (pretty much all the hotkeys burned into muscle memory) gives me something to strive for when learning other tools and skills. I know what fluency feels like now, and I know when I'm lacking in it. For me though, the most important thing about pursuing mastery of one or two things instead of full generalization, is that it teaches you patience. Genuine patience. Something I feel is becoming a lost art in our modern time. Seeing how far you've come after six years of working at something, and then looking at your inspirations and seeing how far you still have to go, is a feeling that can either break you, and make you give up, (if you are impatient), or can help you, as you have the choice to just keep grinding away and choosing to be patient. 3D modeling and animation is a ten year (minimum) goal for me, and it's served as a wonderful learning experience for me in many, unforseeable ways. To tie it back to your post, I take this "ten years" mentality to almost everything I choose to learn nowadays: I try to stay away from the fancy new frameworks and toys, and try to learn fundamental things that I can spend ten years learning and still have space to grow.
- pranaygp 7y ago
  I love this. Yup, it's something I've completely left out, but that was (partially) intentional. I wish I did a better job explaining this, but yes - the technique I talk about won't let you master anything, but will let you scratch the surface on a lot of things really fast. There are things I want to master, but there are too many things out there that fit that bill for me and I still haven't found something I'm able to spend the amount of time you've put into 3D modeling without getting distracted. I hope to write a follow up post to this when my own thoughts on this topic are more clear.
oxplot 7y ago
I wrote about something similar in the past: https://blog.oxplot.com/transient-ideas-and-learning/ https://blog.oxplot.com/transient-ideas-and-learning/
betocmn 7y ago
It's a clear flywheel. Desire/Curiosity -> Risk-taking -> Delayed Gratification -> Self-Confidence -> "Give me more".
meuk 7y ago
I found that companies always pretend to be all about learning, but in practice I haven't learned a damn thing after leaving uni, except the idiosyncrasies of their code. Maybe it gets better in senior positions (I spent 7 years in uni and have only 2 years of working experience), but I don't expect so. I feel like since I am working, I am just getting dumber. I miss the time in uni where I was learning new things every week. I'm thinking of taking a year off just to learn new things.
- usgroup 7y ago
  Unfortunately you probably are getting dumber, look to folks who had the same trajectory as you but are further ahead for confirmation. If your work doesn’t get more interesting you’ll adapt to fight the boredom by becoming dumber. You have to fight that somehow if you value your mind.
  - galfarragem 7y ago
    > If your work doesn’t get more interesting you’ll adapt to fight the boredom by becoming dumber. This matches my experience also. And is transversal to all fields.
  - snak 7y ago
    Fighting boredom by becoming dumber, couldn't have said it better myself. If you feel like this is happening, it is time for a change.
    - Aromasin 7y ago
      Anecdotally I felt that the 'become dumb to fight the boredom' mentality spills quite easily into life outside of work if you let it too. If I had a challenging day, I'd go home and study or build something - I'd keep the productive 'train' going. If I had a dull day, which was most days after the first 3 months getting to grips with the job, I'd go home and blank out watching a TV show or playing a video game. I couldn't break out of the 'dumb' mind-set after spending 8 hours in it. Regretfully I've lost weeks and months to this mindless monotony over the last year. Thankfully Friday is my last day, and I start a post-graduate course in October which should be a splash of cold water for my brain. In short, I'm very much in support of your second point.
supr_strudl 7y ago
Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World by David Epstein.
civicsquid 7y ago
Some of the examples listed when the author speaks about why they are such a good learner felt a bit forced to me. I understand that authority is being established here, but a good number of the early examples seem to be what I would expect from a successful college student who has done an internship or two (e.g. what is recursion, building reusable UI components for a large company). I also clicked through to some of the projects to find that they were team efforts, not independent projects that the author miraculously completed due to their own precociousness alone. This felt a bit misrepresented to me, although I understand the intent was probably just to show the breadth of involvement. All in all I was happy to read the author's advice about learning but something about the intro rubbed me the wrong way. The author clearly has had quite a good number of experiences and I'm glad they're publishing these thoughts on those experiences. I just wonder if the post could do without the early hints of (forgive me) vaingloriousness? It felt quite academic and intriguing past the intro for me. As the author may see this: please don't take this as anything other than a single individual's thoughts. I mean in no way to discourage you.
- thedevilslawyer 7y ago
  I got the same vibe, and it did take away from perhaps an otherwise good point.
- gingabriska 7y ago
  If you are in industry and you've some experience, highly likely you are already doing what the author claims to be his fast learning secrets. There are actually no deep secrets I find in his post, all of those things atleast I instictively do. Even my friends use same approach, so I thought it's so common that I don't have to write a blog post about it.
  - civicsquid 7y ago
    Maybe the technique in this post is common, but I personally believe that putting yourself and your thoughts out there is a good thing for engineers and critical thinkers in general. It allows us to get feedback and involve others on a wider scale, even if that means writing about things that have been discussed or thought about a number of times before.
mettamage 7y ago
This post could be expanded with what learning resources you found really awesome and why. I use HN to find the best programming and math resources by using their search function, looking at the most upvoted learning resources or by scouring the comments and finding a consensus in a more qualitative manner. On the top of my head: it led me to places such as Gilbert Strang for linear algebra or Eloquent JavaScript for a good introductory textbook and JavaScript The Good Parts for a more advanced textbook. 3Blue1Brown was a good channel for mathematics. And it is also thanks to HN that I discovered vimtutor. There are also a lot of references made her to Coursera course Learning how to Learn.
- pranaygp 7y ago
  Definitely, I listed a few examples of great resources to make a point on the article. Another resource that seems like it might be great that I'm currently reading is Julian Shapiro's growth marketing guide - https://www.julian.com/guide/growth/intro https://www.julian.com/guide/growth/intro It is long form text, which is an automatic -1 for me, and I dismissed this for a while, but over time it's seemed to come out as one of those "great" resources in a different domain that I muse read. After starting, I noticed 1. It reads more like vimtutor than an article; i.e. you pick your own adventure, which I can bite 2. Many people I look up to as experts have directly recommended this to me 3. It's relevant to me now - I'm working on a startup I still dismissed the guide for a long time and wasn't convinced it was the best resource out there - but it's starting to seem like it's atleast a local maxima for me. I hope that made sense into how I think about resources when learning. I don't yet have a coherent system in place to determine how valuable a resource is to me. I usually only know months or years later
surelyyoujest 7y ago
Basically, Pranay needed to boast his CV to the world and wrote a clickbaity article where half the paragraphs are mentions of his accomplishments and the rest is common sense which can be described as "learn enough to ask good questions and practice."
- richard23132 7y ago
  The first paragraph in which he boasts his achievements is what made me very interested in the article and led to focus reading carefully. I see the boasting is a by product of providing evidence, i don't see boasting alone in the post. It doesn't matter it's useful stuff.
  - jsf01 7y ago
    If you clicked on any of the project links you’d see that most of them are exaggerated or misrepresented in the intro. A lot of team efforts for which he gave no credit to the others involved. I can understand the desire to establish authority from a writing perspective, but the author is embellishing his achievements here in a disingenuous way.
- kpennell 7y ago
  Exactly. What a disappointing article.
jsf01 7y ago
There comes a point in the learning process for any subject where you get so excited about the fact that you understand something new that you feel you need to tell everyone about it. This feels like one of those posts—the author has very limited experience, but he has formalized a coherent (albeit unoriginal) idea and because of that exciting feeling he now wants to shout it to the world. It’s good to write as an exercise to help you grow or solidify your ideas, and a post like this, with all its self-congratulatory language, probably would have ended up better if it were written for OP himself rather than for the world. Instead, by publishing it, the author has the need to establish (and, it feels, compensate for) “why I’m qualified to talk about this”. It’s premature to have shared this underdeveloped idea, just as it’s premature for the author to be boasting his achievements.
- pranaygp 7y ago
  Bingo! I am an author with very limited experience and this was an exercise in growing and solidifying my own ideas. To that end, I chose to write about an underdeveloped idea and share it with the world. If you look me up, you'll find a string of unfinished and incomplete projects and ideas. I'm usually not scared about sharing underdeveloped ideas prematurely - I think it helps me grow (I wouldn't have gotten as much feedback on this post if I never shared it)
esseeayen 7y ago
Hi OP I am wondering if you ever did the corsera course "Learning how to learn" and what your thoughts were on it and if the you consciously or unconsciously employed the methods described to help you learn new topics.
- pranaygp 7y ago
  OP here, I haven't actually, but just looked it up and it looks like it talks more about test prep than the type of learning I talk about. Most of my coding skills come from self-learning things online the way I talked about it, at my own pace, without exams to reinforce that. However, for test prep, through school and college I have read and tried a lot of guides on learning including simple index cards, the Leitner System (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leitner_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leitner_system), coming up with mnemonics, transcribing content from a source medium to some other medium, the Feynman technique, etc. What I learnt about myself was that any technique involving writing didn't work for me. I would never go back to read something I wrote. I hated writing. I often walked into lectures without a notebook and just listened instead. Don't memorize. Listen. Understand. I have friends who were brilliant "test takers" - which to me meant they could quickly memorize a lot just before an exam. That's something I'm bad at, so I took tests primarily based on what I'd understood over lectures, or follow up discussions I had with professors or classmates. This also means I wouldn't practice math questions or work out physics problems before a test - I'd sorta just read over solved problems and make sure I understood them. In retrospect, I actually think this isn't a great way to study for an exam and I always got very nervous just before a test because I feel grossly underprepared, but I saw passing them as a formality and usually just worked on other things I found fun (for instance, I built CSS Peek during finals week of sophomore year).
- proverbialbunny 7y ago
  imho if you plan on taking the course, try to find a better solution to every idea they suggest. The ideas behind why learning is the way it is are valid and well researched, but their solutions, while valid, could be better. If the course moved from a set of rules to a set of principles and a philosophy, imho the course would be more useful. One of the few things that blew my mind in the course was how they interviewed someone who went around the world learning different languages at an accelerated rate. His method is to learn enough to ask questions, then he only spoke in that language slowly picking up the language the way a kid does. Most of the class comes down to differentiating between a focused and diffused state (though it's really a spectrum) and how to get into each mental state and the benefits of doing so. imho, if you want to accelerate learning, learn how to meditate. It will increase awareness and reduce distractions. Though this is a bit more advanced than the class' recommendation.
khole113 7y ago
As Far as i'm concerned i know a hacker that actually work. So if that passes for difference between hackers and crackers then i guess so. I want to thank Jay for coming to my aid just about the period i was giving up. This is just as i promised to do. we had to come to terms i must admit after quite a difficult period and i had to promise to vouch on any platform that i'm allowed. If you are truly in need of ethical hacking services i personally vouch for Jay. You can contact through email;onlineghosthacker247@gmail.com Cheers.
allenleein 7y ago
Instead of reading 'Learn You a Haskell', I would say go 'Haskell Programming From First Principle.

307 points by pranaygp 7y ago

>> , scaled a botnet of over 2,000 bots that made money from a popular trivia game, Did this make anyone else flinch? edit: I do want to comment on the Feynman Technique linked in the article. I've never actually written concepts down as explained, but it's very close to how I _actually_ learn (or at least, feel confident in my knowledge). If I can't explain something in plain language, there's a good chance I've gaps. The steps listed are pretty succinct - going to have to give it a try!

downandout 7y ago
I wouldn't say it made me flinch, but that is not a throwaway line. It deserves some additional, I'm sure quite interesting, explanation. But I believe he is referring to HQ, and there have been other write-ups on HN about how to automate beating it.
- pranaygp 7y ago
  I love telling this story, but that wasn't the point of the post
  - downandout 7y ago
    Fair enough. Out of curiosity, was this a big money maker for you? Like 5 or 6 figures?
  - samvher 7y ago
    At the end you mention you may have found a good resource to improve your writing. Which resource is that? It's something I want to get better at as well.

samplatt 7y ago

Work's firewall is coming up saying this site is malware :S

pranaygp 7y ago
Most probably because I haven't been able to setup HTTPS yet. I just moved my site to svbtle today (https://svbtle.com https://svbtle.com) and I'm still waiting for them to help with that
leonidasv 7y ago
You can read it using a "focused reader" service like Outline: https://outline.com/cvHmpU https://outline.com/cvHmpU
deleted 7y ago
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NHQ 7y ago

This describes me pretty well. I'm a dedicated learner, and I think it's what I do best. I don't master topics. Even the information about the thing can be a distraction. It's about synthesizing info into your working knowledge. Everything is reference. CSS is a great example. Do I know everything about it, even after 10 years? Nope. But I know it well enough that a quick reference is all I need for any problem. Programming in general, too. Took me a minute to grok fundamental things (data types, functions, etc). I don't care what language I use, it's all one, plus syntax. I want to use other languages, for fun and synthesis.

Rapzid 7y ago
:D I found out the fun way this trait often doesn't fly in interviews when they ask about your best quality.. Scuttled a phone interview with a hiring manager at Cloudflare real fast and he condescendingly chortled that "Everyone says that". Thought I did an okay job rescuing the interview after that but.. Wasn't feeling the dude anyway after that so I guess the feeling was mutual :)
- ct520 7y ago
  I agree. But I feel the people / company that recognize and appreciate your broad skill set is the place you want to be. I struggled a bit on this myself.
  - VvR-Ox 7y ago
    It's their loss and it's a huge reward seeing their faces when you touch something that becomes a really good business after they declined ;-)
stan_rogers 7y ago
"The determined Real Programmer can write FORTRAN programs in any language." - Ed Post, Real Programmers Don't Use Pascal, 1982. There is a hell of a lot more difference between the various programming languages than their syntax. Natural languages as well - you can render idiomatic English in any language, and if you don't care very much about getting your intended meaning across (and your listeners are both patient and fond of puzzles), you may well choose to do so. It may get you food and lodgings for the night. But the computing equivalent of getting by in a pidgin isn't quite the same thing as programming in the language you're using.

danenania 7y ago

I couldn’t agree more about finding the best resources. As with many other things in life, there are power law effects in how intelligent and knowledgeable experts are in their fields, and more importantly, how skilled they are at communicating what they know. The very best are orders of magnitude better than the average expert, and you will learn exponentially faster and better if you can find these people. This means being very discriminating—if you don’t find yourself highly enthusiastic to read/watch/listen to more of someone, you are much better off moving on quickly than trudging through without being truly inspired. It’s better to search broadly at first, then zero in when you feel that ‘click’. Unfortunately, most schools and universities take the exact opposite approach. While you can eventually get very deeply and thoroughly educated about a specific field via academia, it’s an incredibly inefficient way to learn.

deleted 7y ago
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whatshisface 7y ago

Of course, some of these steps (like finding the best learning resource), can only be done once you're already an expert who knows what all of the resources are! There are also a lot of situational things, for example although you may have a preference between videos, documentation and example code, the best to learn from is usually whatever medium the best teacher decided to use.

pranaygp 7y ago
Experts usually know some great resources, but are often themselves your best resource if you have access to one. I definitely forgot to mention them, the people I worked with at Facebook and ZEIT are on that list. But when I wasn't working somewhere, I had to find my own resources and trust my own instincts. I didn't know who the best teachers were, so I had to decide for myself, what the best resource for me would be. Often, I got it wrong, but I got better and finding the diamonds in the rough.

chaboud 7y ago

“I left an important part out of the process above - how do you actually find the best resource. I don’t know. That said, I’ve gotten “lucky” enough times that I think I know how to optimize for finding it.” Pro tip: No, you don’t. I’m game to explain it over coffee to the author, who seems to be in the Bay Area, but this writing reads a lot like someone who just started to scratch the surface on abstract learning and metacognition while thinking that it’s a wildly new discovery. It’s hard to hear/read the reenforcing recitations of new-to-the-(speaker/author) concepts and not see it as a slow-motion replay of a common thought process, akin to sitting in Dolores park listening to musings on democracy and governance in the age of automation... thirty minutes after a batch of pot truffles has sold out... As a generalist/multi-whatever, let me say this: expert engineers hate the knows-enough-to-be-dangerous guy who thinks he’s god’s gift to learning that can just walk in and be conversant after reading one book. That guy is a pain in the ass know-it-all that spoils conversations, derails projects, and digs bottomless pits of technical debt. How do I know? I was that guy when I was younger, and I’m sure I drove people nuts. No doubt there are times when I’m still that guy, but I try to hold my tongue more now until I’m confident in what I know and openly disclose where I think I fall short. If you can’t take that mechanism for learning and flex it down to the bottom of the rabbit hole, or if you always fall back onto the crutch of relating a complex topic to a comfortable imperfect analogue, you’re aiming to be the engineer that gets handed non-critical work or the manager that nobody wants in a meeting... Or maybe a successful founder of some kick-ass mega unicorn... sigh... whatever. In the big companies (and Silicon Valley) I hear/see this type of thinking and self-congratulation all the time among engineers with 1-4 years of professional experience. On occasion, those engineers have the horsepower to back it up, but it’s rare. Some of that write-up resonates with how I’ve learned/worked over time, but I’d never write something so stridently confident. Me 20 years ago?

satyanash 7y ago
Given that software as a arena is a widely competitive and rapidly evolving one, you can never know if the person in front of you is an expert or not. In such a case, what has always helped me is to first remind myself to be humble and use this cheatsheet: * ask questions that probe your point of concern, instead of pointing out flaws. This allows the other person to reveal his expertise with a solution and also enlighten you in the process or admit their mistake. * Never claim to know everything. Always be cognizant of the fact that other people ("newer" people) will show you up. Always be willing to learn from anybody who makes a concise argument.

akhilcacharya 7y ago

I agree with the BFS strategy but I’ve never gotten good enough at anything to gain the respect of an SME.

pranaygp 7y ago
SME?
- leetrout 7y ago
  Subject Matter Expert
- akhilcacharya 7y ago
  Subject matter expert
- cam8001 7y ago
  Subject Matter Expert, I think.
- chaboud 7y ago
  Subject-matter expert. One critical way to become a better learner on a team (that is, a far less annoying learner) is to recognize when to ask a question of someone else and when to just Google/Portal/XPlore/etc it. Interactive mentors will be far more welcoming when they feel like you’ve earned the roadblock that you’re up against.
  - pranaygp 7y ago
    Great point! I've been called out for aggressively soliciting help

proverbialbunny 7y ago

I made a hobby out of exploring how learning works. The author is spot on. However, there are some tweaks worth considering: 1) The author proposes learning _everything_ under the sun, so that one has enough dependencies to learn new topics. This is like downloading most of the packages in aptitude to speed up builds. However, I prefer to go about it in a different way. I focus on patience and normalizing myself to long and deep build chains. Learning a light topic in a new domain can take hours, if not days, to understand it deep enough to successfully use it to learn other concepts. When there is something I need or want to know, but when I pull up Wikipedia and see a bunch of foreign vocabulary, I will create a dependency list of vocabulary, and learn everything I need to know to read that article and flawlessly understand it. If it is a new topic it can sometimes take a week of slow learning to quickly learn. It seems painfully slow, but it's learning a large chunk of a new domain in a week. This could be something a college class takes months to go over, so the rate is quite accelerated even if at the time it doesn't seem like it. Slow and steady really does win the race. 2) >I keep trying while following a breadth-first-search approach to domains and resources as described above. and >Stop. This is counter-intuitive, but unless you want to become a master at something (besides learning), you really just want to know everything at an intermediate level. When recursively learning prerequisite concepts, usually understanding 100% of every prerequisite concept is necessary. There are no short cuts. In this scenario a depth first search is ideal, finding the root and starting there. Likewise, a dependency chain of concepts is a chain of abstraction. When learning a prerequisite concept, no matter how abstract it is, it must be thought of as concrete. It must be understood as if it is concrete. This is the minimum bar to using a concept to build up other concepts. This is can be thought of as an intermediate level of understanding, but I suspect for most people this means mastery. Don't stop short. 3) What is learned will be forgotten within a couple of weeks, unless it a) has been pondered about a minimum of 6 seconds, usually by making up a story to describe it to yourself. The 6 second rule is a neurological limitation that is required to move the memory from short term to long term storage. And b) It is strongly beneficial for what is learned to leave the mind and come back into it on one way or another. This can happen by doing something with your hands, talking out loud about it to someone else, or note taking. This is important and without it details will be lost. I write in a condensed mind-map list like format for this reason. Likewise if I forget something or remember something wrong, I can go back with a ctrl+f and figure out what I did wrong. 4) Etymology is massively important when it comes to learning. The history of why the concept is called what it is called, as well as understanding why it was invented or how it was discovered. I try to visualize what the world was like before the thing I am learning existed and how things used to be done. This teaches me of it's power and when and why to use it. When etymology is done right, the mind will record the concept into spacial awareness which is the strongest and longest lasting kind of memory we have. There is a lot I could say, but by understanding where people are coming from, you can apply what technique is ideal for that specific task. Learning is no different. One can master it, and from that the gains are innumerable.

deleted 7y ago

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aur09 7y ago

Relying on fast estimations is one of the most powerful aspects of the way our brains work. But applying the skill of finding and applying fast estimations exclusively to every topic--like reading SparkNotes over an original piece--is a good way to eventually know very little. Suppose any rate of decay in the things you retain. If your starting point is already small, losing any of it comes at a high cost. At least when pursuing mastery of a subject, you are repeatedly faced with new ways of understanding the basics, to the point that they are innate and automatic. You might forget small specifics which you can later find in your known references, but without mastery you might instead forget the basics--and relying on a reference for those basics means it's much less clear when they are aptly applied. I would hazard a guess that that's why people have always tended to master only one or a couple skills, but people congregate and work in complement with others who have mastery over other skills. The community is the entity with knowledge over many domains--not the individual who learns tons of surface material. And simultaneously, everyone does learn a little bit about a lot of topics from time to time. But that balance is important--so I wouldn't personally weight so heavily the cursory synthesis portion of it as OP did. -- Also, a little advice to OP. Drop some of the grandiose introduction. 100% of the links I clicked in the first paragraph were more disappointing than their descriptions led me to anticipate.

aronowb14 7y ago

Interesting post! It's almost exactly what I've found that has worked well for me. Putting in the three or four hours at the beginning of the process of learning something to find the best resources is essential. That being said, I do think the importance of mastering one or two things should not be overstated, and was kind of ignored in your post. Let me elaborate: for me my deepest skill has been 3D modeling and rendering: it's been about six years of pretty consistent practice, doing motion graphics, general modeling, animation, color theory, and really just trying to absorb all the knowledge I can about this specific passion. This process has been super useful for a couple reasons, and kind of worked to snap me out of the "generalist" learning mindset. For example, I've found the learning curve over time for 3D modeling is pretty generalizable to other skills I learn: because I've sunk so much time into it, and have had to push through plateaus, and grind over hills, and realize when I'm just coasting, whenever I am learning other things, I recognize the emotion swing and know roughly where in the learning process I am. Similarly, the fluency I have with my 3D modeling tools (pretty much all the hotkeys burned into muscle memory) gives me something to strive for when learning other tools and skills. I know what fluency feels like now, and I know when I'm lacking in it. For me though, the most important thing about pursuing mastery of one or two things instead of full generalization, is that it teaches you patience. Genuine patience. Something I feel is becoming a lost art in our modern time. Seeing how far you've come after six years of working at something, and then looking at your inspirations and seeing how far you still have to go, is a feeling that can either break you, and make you give up, (if you are impatient), or can help you, as you have the choice to just keep grinding away and choosing to be patient. 3D modeling and animation is a ten year (minimum) goal for me, and it's served as a wonderful learning experience for me in many, unforseeable ways. To tie it back to your post, I take this "ten years" mentality to almost everything I choose to learn nowadays: I try to stay away from the fancy new frameworks and toys, and try to learn fundamental things that I can spend ten years learning and still have space to grow.

pranaygp 7y ago
I love this. Yup, it's something I've completely left out, but that was (partially) intentional. I wish I did a better job explaining this, but yes - the technique I talk about won't let you master anything, but will let you scratch the surface on a lot of things really fast. There are things I want to master, but there are too many things out there that fit that bill for me and I still haven't found something I'm able to spend the amount of time you've put into 3D modeling without getting distracted. I hope to write a follow up post to this when my own thoughts on this topic are more clear.

oxplot 7y ago

I wrote about something similar in the past: https://blog.oxplot.com/transient-ideas-and-learning/ https://blog.oxplot.com/transient-ideas-and-learning/

betocmn 7y ago

It's a clear flywheel. Desire/Curiosity -> Risk-taking -> Delayed Gratification -> Self-Confidence -> "Give me more".

meuk 7y ago

I found that companies always pretend to be all about learning, but in practice I haven't learned a damn thing after leaving uni, except the idiosyncrasies of their code. Maybe it gets better in senior positions (I spent 7 years in uni and have only 2 years of working experience), but I don't expect so. I feel like since I am working, I am just getting dumber. I miss the time in uni where I was learning new things every week. I'm thinking of taking a year off just to learn new things.

usgroup 7y ago
Unfortunately you probably are getting dumber, look to folks who had the same trajectory as you but are further ahead for confirmation. If your work doesn’t get more interesting you’ll adapt to fight the boredom by becoming dumber. You have to fight that somehow if you value your mind.
- galfarragem 7y ago
  > If your work doesn’t get more interesting you’ll adapt to fight the boredom by becoming dumber. This matches my experience also. And is transversal to all fields.
- snak 7y ago
  Fighting boredom by becoming dumber, couldn't have said it better myself. If you feel like this is happening, it is time for a change.
  - Aromasin 7y ago
    Anecdotally I felt that the 'become dumb to fight the boredom' mentality spills quite easily into life outside of work if you let it too. If I had a challenging day, I'd go home and study or build something - I'd keep the productive 'train' going. If I had a dull day, which was most days after the first 3 months getting to grips with the job, I'd go home and blank out watching a TV show or playing a video game. I couldn't break out of the 'dumb' mind-set after spending 8 hours in it. Regretfully I've lost weeks and months to this mindless monotony over the last year. Thankfully Friday is my last day, and I start a post-graduate course in October which should be a splash of cold water for my brain. In short, I'm very much in support of your second point.

supr_strudl 7y ago

Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World by David Epstein.

civicsquid 7y ago

Some of the examples listed when the author speaks about why they are such a good learner felt a bit forced to me. I understand that authority is being established here, but a good number of the early examples seem to be what I would expect from a successful college student who has done an internship or two (e.g. what is recursion, building reusable UI components for a large company). I also clicked through to some of the projects to find that they were team efforts, not independent projects that the author miraculously completed due to their own precociousness alone. This felt a bit misrepresented to me, although I understand the intent was probably just to show the breadth of involvement. All in all I was happy to read the author's advice about learning but something about the intro rubbed me the wrong way. The author clearly has had quite a good number of experiences and I'm glad they're publishing these thoughts on those experiences. I just wonder if the post could do without the early hints of (forgive me) vaingloriousness? It felt quite academic and intriguing past the intro for me. As the author may see this: please don't take this as anything other than a single individual's thoughts. I mean in no way to discourage you.

thedevilslawyer 7y ago
I got the same vibe, and it did take away from perhaps an otherwise good point.
gingabriska 7y ago
If you are in industry and you've some experience, highly likely you are already doing what the author claims to be his fast learning secrets. There are actually no deep secrets I find in his post, all of those things atleast I instictively do. Even my friends use same approach, so I thought it's so common that I don't have to write a blog post about it.
- civicsquid 7y ago
  Maybe the technique in this post is common, but I personally believe that putting yourself and your thoughts out there is a good thing for engineers and critical thinkers in general. It allows us to get feedback and involve others on a wider scale, even if that means writing about things that have been discussed or thought about a number of times before.

mettamage 7y ago

This post could be expanded with what learning resources you found really awesome and why. I use HN to find the best programming and math resources by using their search function, looking at the most upvoted learning resources or by scouring the comments and finding a consensus in a more qualitative manner. On the top of my head: it led me to places such as Gilbert Strang for linear algebra or Eloquent JavaScript for a good introductory textbook and JavaScript The Good Parts for a more advanced textbook. 3Blue1Brown was a good channel for mathematics. And it is also thanks to HN that I discovered vimtutor. There are also a lot of references made her to Coursera course Learning how to Learn.

pranaygp 7y ago
Definitely, I listed a few examples of great resources to make a point on the article. Another resource that seems like it might be great that I'm currently reading is Julian Shapiro's growth marketing guide - https://www.julian.com/guide/growth/intro https://www.julian.com/guide/growth/intro It is long form text, which is an automatic -1 for me, and I dismissed this for a while, but over time it's seemed to come out as one of those "great" resources in a different domain that I muse read. After starting, I noticed 1. It reads more like vimtutor than an article; i.e. you pick your own adventure, which I can bite 2. Many people I look up to as experts have directly recommended this to me 3. It's relevant to me now - I'm working on a startup I still dismissed the guide for a long time and wasn't convinced it was the best resource out there - but it's starting to seem like it's atleast a local maxima for me. I hope that made sense into how I think about resources when learning. I don't yet have a coherent system in place to determine how valuable a resource is to me. I usually only know months or years later

surelyyoujest 7y ago

Basically, Pranay needed to boast his CV to the world and wrote a clickbaity article where half the paragraphs are mentions of his accomplishments and the rest is common sense which can be described as "learn enough to ask good questions and practice."

richard23132 7y ago
The first paragraph in which he boasts his achievements is what made me very interested in the article and led to focus reading carefully. I see the boasting is a by product of providing evidence, i don't see boasting alone in the post. It doesn't matter it's useful stuff.
- jsf01 7y ago
  If you clicked on any of the project links you’d see that most of them are exaggerated or misrepresented in the intro. A lot of team efforts for which he gave no credit to the others involved. I can understand the desire to establish authority from a writing perspective, but the author is embellishing his achievements here in a disingenuous way.
kpennell 7y ago
Exactly. What a disappointing article.

jsf01 7y ago

There comes a point in the learning process for any subject where you get so excited about the fact that you understand something new that you feel you need to tell everyone about it. This feels like one of those posts—the author has very limited experience, but he has formalized a coherent (albeit unoriginal) idea and because of that exciting feeling he now wants to shout it to the world. It’s good to write as an exercise to help you grow or solidify your ideas, and a post like this, with all its self-congratulatory language, probably would have ended up better if it were written for OP himself rather than for the world. Instead, by publishing it, the author has the need to establish (and, it feels, compensate for) “why I’m qualified to talk about this”. It’s premature to have shared this underdeveloped idea, just as it’s premature for the author to be boasting his achievements.

pranaygp 7y ago
Bingo! I am an author with very limited experience and this was an exercise in growing and solidifying my own ideas. To that end, I chose to write about an underdeveloped idea and share it with the world. If you look me up, you'll find a string of unfinished and incomplete projects and ideas. I'm usually not scared about sharing underdeveloped ideas prematurely - I think it helps me grow (I wouldn't have gotten as much feedback on this post if I never shared it)

esseeayen 7y ago

Hi OP I am wondering if you ever did the corsera course "Learning how to learn" and what your thoughts were on it and if the you consciously or unconsciously employed the methods described to help you learn new topics.

pranaygp 7y ago
OP here, I haven't actually, but just looked it up and it looks like it talks more about test prep than the type of learning I talk about. Most of my coding skills come from self-learning things online the way I talked about it, at my own pace, without exams to reinforce that. However, for test prep, through school and college I have read and tried a lot of guides on learning including simple index cards, the Leitner System (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leitner_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leitner_system), coming up with mnemonics, transcribing content from a source medium to some other medium, the Feynman technique, etc. What I learnt about myself was that any technique involving writing didn't work for me. I would never go back to read something I wrote. I hated writing. I often walked into lectures without a notebook and just listened instead. Don't memorize. Listen. Understand. I have friends who were brilliant "test takers" - which to me meant they could quickly memorize a lot just before an exam. That's something I'm bad at, so I took tests primarily based on what I'd understood over lectures, or follow up discussions I had with professors or classmates. This also means I wouldn't practice math questions or work out physics problems before a test - I'd sorta just read over solved problems and make sure I understood them. In retrospect, I actually think this isn't a great way to study for an exam and I always got very nervous just before a test because I feel grossly underprepared, but I saw passing them as a formality and usually just worked on other things I found fun (for instance, I built CSS Peek during finals week of sophomore year).
proverbialbunny 7y ago
imho if you plan on taking the course, try to find a better solution to every idea they suggest. The ideas behind why learning is the way it is are valid and well researched, but their solutions, while valid, could be better. If the course moved from a set of rules to a set of principles and a philosophy, imho the course would be more useful. One of the few things that blew my mind in the course was how they interviewed someone who went around the world learning different languages at an accelerated rate. His method is to learn enough to ask questions, then he only spoke in that language slowly picking up the language the way a kid does. Most of the class comes down to differentiating between a focused and diffused state (though it's really a spectrum) and how to get into each mental state and the benefits of doing so. imho, if you want to accelerate learning, learn how to meditate. It will increase awareness and reduce distractions. Though this is a bit more advanced than the class' recommendation.

khole113 7y ago

As Far as i'm concerned i know a hacker that actually work. So if that passes for difference between hackers and crackers then i guess so. I want to thank Jay for coming to my aid just about the period i was giving up. This is just as i promised to do. we had to come to terms i must admit after quite a difficult period and i had to promise to vouch on any platform that i'm allowed. If you are truly in need of ethical hacking services i personally vouch for Jay. You can contact through email;onlineghosthacker247@gmail.com Cheers.

allenleein 7y ago

Instead of reading 'Learn You a Haskell', I would say go 'Haskell Programming From First Principle.