Comment by MRD85 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by MRD85 | Hacker News Reader

His use of loops just seems like an implementation of breaking a problem down into smaller components. If I wanted to learn to learn a difficult skill, such as writing a decent novel, I'd break it down as follows:

1) Research what skills I'll need to develop. At my current stage of learning I don't know what I don't know.

2) Figure out a path to start developing skills. This might be writing a small story every single day while also reading books/guides on how to develop as a writer. I'm still writing daily.

3) As I'm becoming mor comfortable writing anything I now need to develop skills on writing specific things. How do I flesh out a character, how do I describe settings, etc. I'm still writing daily.

4) Once I've figured out individual building blocks I'd then teach myself how to construct them together. What elements do stories contain? How do I flow between small sections to weave a larger tale? I'm still writing daily.

I'm sure as I become a more knowledgeable and skilled writer I'd identify other areas I need to work on, skills to develop, etc. It all comes down to identify small blocks and build from there.

For a long time I've had this idea about creating a website where this type of idea is expressed. I envision it to be some large hierarchical tree like structure (not unlike the ones you see in games like FInal Fantasy) where you pick a topic you want to learn and it gives you the basics to learn and then once mastered allows you to goes deeper by diverging into specialised categories.

Sounds great! Something I found lacking in school was that nobody could take "I want to do X" and turn it into "You should learn A, B, D, and R", nor the reverse.

then you should work on that website a little every day, while researching how to make it even better :)

I've prototyped this mentally too. If I were going to do it, I think I'd write myself a modification to a Wiki engine that can detect when links only go to simpler things, and highlight those. (You don't want to "ban" links going up to harder things, but you may want to isolate them in a dedicated section or something.)

You might be able to bootstrap off of wikipedia content.

The thought that provoked this in my own head was the observation that Wikipedia is virtually useless for learning anything mathematical because so many of the links on any given article head "up", rather than "down", and a casual user can't figure out which is which.

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