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> But there’s also a part of me that’s just like, how can you not be curious? How can you write Python for 5 years of your life and never look at a bit of sourc

• oneoff786 4y ago
  Seems pretentious to me. I’ve never bothered to look through many things I use. I look extensively at how to use them and what the API offers. I have a good intuition for how most models work. I don’t really care about the specifics of the implementations. I have more important things to do. The hacker mentality, imo, is about identifying what’s useful for you to explore to accomplish whatever you need. Often that’s a lot of glue between things that other people built. Other times it’s tweaking the internals to do something a bit different.
  • mark_l_watson 4y ago
    I agree with you. Super powers are seeing value in doing something, and then finding the easiest and most efficient path to get there. That said, sometimes I do like to read the code in libraries I use but often this is more for enjoyment with occasionally learning something interesting.
    • chris_wot 4y ago
      How can you see the value in doing something if you don’t understand the underlying concepts?
      • mark_l_watson 4y ago
        It depends. Sometimes for work or personal reasons I just need to get something done and API docs, etc. is all I need for that. And sometimes I dig deep. I have over 50 US patents and enjoy technical work, so sometimes I do dive deep.
  • r-zip 4y ago
    That's all fine, as long as you still understand the underlying assumptions and pitfalls. Many people who skim documentation and throw things together haphazardly do not.
    • oneoff786 4y ago
      Skim documentation != going through repos
  • 6gvONxR4sf7o 4y ago
    If you think it’s about implementation details, you’re misunderstanding. It’s about understanding the principles behind it. As an example, it’s more about understanding the statistics and linear algebra around estimating uncertainty in GLM regression estimates, than about reading the code for how the statsmodels library implements that.
    • oneoff786 4y ago
      If you want to understand the intuition behind a model you should read a paper, book, or even a blog before the repo imo.
  • wittycardio 4y ago
    "it's pretentious to know what you're doing" just be a haxxor xD
  • hnews_account_1 4y ago
    This is not about the hacker mentality. This is a researcher mentality from a daily life perspective. Some people just aren’t curious. I like to understand the math and the computing models behind many things I use. That doesn’t mean I want to know what’s happening in Windows internals or something just because I use Windows everyday. But if I’m creating an app connecting to Office DLLs, I want to know what it does beyond “here’s a bunch of methods and constants you can use”. I’d further argue that the nature of a hacker / power user is to break things apart once you want to get deep enough. If I need to know where in the cluster my instance of some software got lost into, I should be able to investigate all the tools I have available to somehow find it. Not just give up and say some garbage collector will get it for me.
  • 7thaccount 4y ago
    I see what you're saying, but the post above seems to indicate that understanding those models SHOULD be important to you if your job is to run those models and explain results and make corporate decisions based off your forecasts. You shouldn't be just passing data through and thinking that it's not your job to actually understand things. The subtlety matters a lot as the software hitting some edge case could completely skew the results. There is a vague line drawn somewhere that tells you what is necessary to learn and what is superfluous. Finding the line isn't easy, but those that label too much as superfluous will likely get more erroneous results and that is a problem. With regards to your API statement, I'm just as guilty regarding reading the code, but I do run some manual tests to ensure that my script calling the database actually does what I think it should. Is that good enough? Who knows :)
• boringg 4y ago
  To counter your professor opinion. The amount of extra time available as a student that I had to pursue things of interest was in the negative. All academic time was spent getting course content accomplished. I am a naturally curious individual but time limitations prevent further exploration in most circumstances. Additionally there is a relevancy factor weighed on top of it. If something looks curious I have to pre-determine if I think the time spent pursuing that rabbit hole has any value to it. Granted you never know the outcome - it is alway a gamble.
  • Davertron 4y ago
    Well good luck then, in my experience the most free time I've ever had in my life was during college. I squandered massive amounts of that time doing things completely unrelated to education, and I definitely don't regret doing that. College isn't just about book learning after all. But still, BY FAR, college is the time of my life when I had the most free time to do whatever I wanted.
    • dpkirchner 4y ago
      Middle and high school is where a lot of students learn to stop being curious due to a lack of time. College demands far fewer hours per day, but it can be hard to forget what was taught previously.
      • affinepplan 4y ago
        idk, college for me demanded a lot more hours per day than middle and high school, not less
      • BeFlatXIII 4y ago
        I have to agree with you. So many of my professors have been vocally disappointed with their students for their lack of intellectual curiosity after it had been beaten out of them through the overstuffed schedules and pointless busy work of K–12.
      • quickthrower2 4y ago
• mschuster91 4y ago
  Not everyone is wired that way. Personally, I have taken apart and reassembled most of the tech stuff I have at home simply because it interests me how things work (and broke and repaired a non-negligible amount of them in the process, to add), I've dabbled in repairing cars, gas boilers, do my own electricity work... but in my social circle, I'm pretty much the only one. And as I grew older, managed to land myself an s/o, I kind of get why - two other parts come into play: The first issue is a lot of acquiring broad-spectrum knowledge involves risking quite an amount of money. A good DSLR cam can easily rack up a few thousand euros, a fully spec'd Mac Pro or larger drones cross the five digits without blinking. Messing around with gas and electricity can kill you, messing with water pipes can cause immense water damage. It takes a lot of ... let's say recklessness to even think about dealing with this if you're not a professional, and you have to have the resources in the first place. But the real issue is time. Students, at least here in Europe, don't have the luxury of taking six or seven years for their basic diploma - "thanks" to the Bologna reforms, you're fucked if you can't make it in the designed timeframe as you won't be eligible for most kinds of financial aid. That means you simply cannot afford "wasting" a week to get that deep level of knowledge, you simply are happy enough if it runs well enough to get a passing grade. And once you've entered the workforce, it becomes even harder to have actual hobbies. It's one thing if you live alone, no one will bat an eye if you pull in an all-nighter on a weekend with just yourself, a crate of beer and a laptop and that's assuming you're not completely drained from your average 40 hours work week, 10 hours of getting to the workplace, and another 10 hours on domestic chores. When you live together with another person, the game completely changes: they also want time and attention from you - bonus points if your s/o has roughly the same interests that you have (which is why I suspect so many people meet their s/o at work). And with children... forget about hobbies of any kind if you don't have enough resources for either yourself or your s/o to be a stay-at-home parent. This is why I so strongly advocate for a four-day and six-hour work week, a proper minimum wage and government-subsidized affordable housing for everyone. Just imagine what useful things people could run as side projects if they actually had the time to pull them off, not to mention the obvious physical and mental health benefits of not having to struggle with survival every single day. Add to that the elimination of "bullshit jobs" and an end of wasting the best minds of the world on financial bullshit (i.e. HFT, "quant investment funds") or advertising... or getting rid of racism and other discrimination. We as humanity could make so much more progress if we were not so hell-bent on exploiting each other.
• strikelaserclaw 4y ago
  curiosity is good but there is so much stuff to learn out there that for many fields learning things deeply is much less important than learning a lot at 25-35% depth.
• warinukraine 4y ago
  > But there’s also a part of me that’s just like, how can you not be curious? How can you write Python for 5 years of your life and never look at a bit of source code and try to understand how it works, why it was designed a certain way, and why a particular file in the repo is there? How can you fit a dozen regressions and not try to understand where those coefficients come from and the linear algebra behind it? I dunno, man. Because there's a lot of things out there which are also interesting, and you don't have time to do all of them, so you choose. And different people choose differently.
  • overgrownzygote 4y ago
    I’m surprised I had to scroll so far to find this response. It was a revelation to me when I realized that, no, it’s not that “most people” lack intellectual curiosity. Their interests are just different than mine.
• nicoburns 4y ago
  I'm pretty curious, but I wonder whether I would have come across that way that my college professors. I felt like college stifled my curiosity. Undergraduate courses rarely care about original or creative work, or about students pursuing their individual interests. They more or less want students to learn what the authorities in the field think. I did student representation while I was at college, so I had quite a bit of contact with teaching staff around discussing the learning process. There were a lot of complaints from their side that students weren't engaging with the course and were rote learning answers for exams. My perspective was that most of the courses were badly taught (students were given little guidance and struggled to learn the basics) AND badly examined (you had to guess at what the professor wanted in order to score well - it wasn't actually assessing learning accurately). The courses where you found truly curious students were the ones that taught the basics in a way that other professors would consider hand holding (which meant they could get passed that onto more advanced material), and gave clear advice on what was expected in and how to approach the exam (so that students didn't have to worry about that and could focus on learning and their interests). You'll always get some students who just aren't interested (perhaps they picked the wrong course, or simply aren't that academic), but you'll also find that the same students respond dramatically differently to different environments.