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by dijksterhuis·7y ago·view on hn ↗
You say that you're talking about "basic" things... I have no idea what a huffman code is or what two's complement even means.

Literally, not figuratively, zero idea.

...

I'm a PhD researcher in Deep Learning... But I had to DuckDuck why differentiation works the way it does to explain it for a friend the other day. I still can't remember what happens when you differentiate minus powers. Does x^-1 become a squared fraction, or fraction of fraction...? Who knows.

I've lived in Linux for years now... Totally forgot how to set up a new user account last week.

I burnt my soup last night. I BURNT A LIQUID.

...

Did you end up getting it right? Yes? That's fine then.

You're human, not a computer. You make mistakes and you forget things. Especially when it's complicated & technical.

If you learn to stop beating yourself up, everything gets easier (he says not quite being there with it yet myself).

2 comments
Beyond even that a lot of what we do in computing is about making it easier for humans to safely forget implementation detail. We have to assume that when you call the object.toString() function that you'll get a string back representing that object. Be it object orientation or functional programming its all about composing the minutia into a grander program and intentionally disregarding implementation detail along the way.

This is why people get frustrated when things are named badly.

You epic human, thank you for this :) the soup bit made me laugh out loud .