3 ms·

From the post: And the way integers and floats are represented isn’t going to change (floating point was standardized in 1985!), so you only have to learn it on

From the post: And the way integers and floats are represented isn’t going to change (floating point was standardized in 1985!), so you only have to learn it once. This got me thinking, what are some things that DON’T change that are worth learning? HN I think is mostly focused on the latest things that change but there’s lot of value in focusing on things that don’t change.

wongarsu 3y ago
SQL was invented in the 70s, and by 2003 had most of the features you will ever use. New stuff gets added over time, and some of it is useful (JSON support), but 99% of use cases are covered by extremely simple stuff that has always been there. Database normalization (1NF, 3NF, BCNF, etc) is worth knowing about when designing any kind of datastore. At least consider the tradeoffs of breaking BCNF. Almost all work on this was done in the 70s. Linear algebra always turns up in unexpected places. Traditionally you would see it mostly in anything even vaguely related to computer graphics, but now it turns out to be quite useful for ML as well. Mostly stuff from the late 1800s, some a couple millennia older. TCP/IP is mostly unchanged since the 70s, ARP is from the 80s, and HTTP1.0 is from the 90s. Combine those 4 and you have a good mental model of how the network stack works, even if HTTP3.0 is a bit more fancy. Linux and Windows are quite different from each other, but the broad strokes of each hasn't changed much in the last two decades. For example knowing how they manage memory or how their respective thread schedulers work is potentially useful (though Linux thread schedulers do change from time to time. Windows seems to be happy with the architecture of theirs though). Backus–Naur Form is an incredibly useful notation for describing context-free grammars. Stuff like valid syntax of a programming language, or how an address can look like. It's from the late 50s, though predecessors reach back much further. Extended Backus–Naur Form from the 90s is probably what you want to use today, it has an ISO standard and a great wikipedia page.

wongarsu 3y ago

SQL was invented in the 70s, and by 2003 had most of the features you will ever use. New stuff gets added over time, and some of it is useful (JSON support), but 99% of use cases are covered by extremely simple stuff that has always been there. Database normalization (1NF, 3NF, BCNF, etc) is worth knowing about when designing any kind of datastore. At least consider the tradeoffs of breaking BCNF. Almost all work on this was done in the 70s. Linear algebra always turns up in unexpected places. Traditionally you would see it mostly in anything even vaguely related to computer graphics, but now it turns out to be quite useful for ML as well. Mostly stuff from the late 1800s, some a couple millennia older. TCP/IP is mostly unchanged since the 70s, ARP is from the 80s, and HTTP1.0 is from the 90s. Combine those 4 and you have a good mental model of how the network stack works, even if HTTP3.0 is a bit more fancy. Linux and Windows are quite different from each other, but the broad strokes of each hasn't changed much in the last two decades. For example knowing how they manage memory or how their respective thread schedulers work is potentially useful (though Linux thread schedulers do change from time to time. Windows seems to be happy with the architecture of theirs though). Backus–Naur Form is an incredibly useful notation for describing context-free grammars. Stuff like valid syntax of a programming language, or how an address can look like. It's from the late 50s, though predecessors reach back much further. Extended Backus–Naur Form from the 90s is probably what you want to use today, it has an ISO standard and a great wikipedia page.