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Comment by cle | Hacker News Reader

The trick is knowing how deep to go, which depends a lot on your goals. If you just want to learn for your own curiosity, rabbit hole forever! If you want to build useful, applicable knowledge, there’a a peak of usefulness after which there are diminishing returns. So being self-aware enough to know when to pull the plug on your rabbit hole is pretty important (professionally).

Also certain kinds of rabbit holes are way more useful than others. If you’re rabbit holing into some obscure, arcane system, and the stuff you’re learning isn’t challenging you fundamentally, you’re probably wasting your time (I call these “rat holes”). If your rabbit hole will yield new fundamental insights into something important...now that’s a good rabbit hole!

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The best depth before you hit the knee in the curve is undergraduate-level textbooks. Sometimes you have to go deeper, but that's the level that is presented in a form that's easy to grasp and can be quickly applied without using too arcane language and abstractions.

Also: Handbooks. For instance, the Art of Electronics. And I recently picked up a mechanical engineering handbook, and the breadth of the topics covered at a level I can quickly understand is very refreshing. (I'm a physicist, but I mostly do mechanical engineering and technician work, with a bit of aerospace and electrical engineering and material science.)

And combined with youtube and Wikipedia, you can learn a lot very quickly.

> The best depth before you hit the knee in the curve is undergraduate-level textbooks.

That matches my experience as well. Having graduated from two fields at university, the most foundational knowledge came in the first two years. The third one is a deepening of the first two but can be skipped if only basis are needed. Then master degree is just playing with higher level concepts and linguo.

For Mechanical engineering, I strongly suggest picking up a used copy of the Machinists Handbook. Excellent handbook for MEs & Machinists that contains nearly any type of reference information you could want on those topics.

>Art of Electronics

What would you suggest before The Art of Electronics?

Practical Electronics for Inventors https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/687619.Practical_Electro...

Title is slightly wanky, but it's the best non-textbook beginner guide I've found, since it actually does contain all the math & theory a hobbyist will need. The explanations are very clear and most motivated people with high-school math should be able to follow along. It's not the best to read back-to-back, but has detailed explanations of lots of areas of electronics that make great primers/refreshers. I had it out last week for a quick refresher on notch filters. Doesn't go into tremendous depth, but more beginner/hobbyist friendly than Art of Electronics shich is similar (and excellent) but aimed at EEs instead of hobbyists.

For something even more beginner-oriented any of Forrest Mims' books (formerly published by Radioshack/Tandy) are great but a little dated, and don't cover anything more modern than discrete logic and don't provide much in the way of theory. Excellent introduction to electronics books though, many fun projects for getting kids into the hobby who want to dive a little deeper into electronics vs. hooking up modules to an Arduino.

I've been writing software for a while now, and "how deep" is tough. In some sense it's just all rabbit holes and yak shaving.

At least for me, the promise of the pomodoro technique is the guarantee that you will take stock of the value of continuing to spelunk or shear, every 25 minutes.

There are also Python holes. Holes that suck you in and don't let you go. People with an obsessive personality type have to be careful not to enter them because when you leave them it might be decades later and you are a husk of what you were.

yea, but in that case the problem isn't entering the hole, but the obsessive personality.

As an obsessive person myself, knowing how to stop, how to put things down and "grasp for air", is something I had to learn to do (meditation helped)

As a newish manager this is something I find difficult to convey. If someone wants to go down a rabbit hole for a day or two and nothing is on fire, by all means. But you can’t do it every week and you can’t disappear for weeks at a time.

For a while I was trying to peddle a metaphor about deposits and withdrawals from a reputation bank, but it didn’t seem to land.

Edit: pedal -> peddle

If by rabbit hole you mean taking the time to know how the system their responsible for maintaining, updating and troubleshooting in production works, I'd say give them as much time as they need. If you think that's taking too long it could be an indicator the system is either too big or too complicated.

I love taking my own time just as much as the next engineer, but if there are extrinsic factors calling for short-term solutions, one can’t take several weeks or months to “research the system” before the crisis is solved.

That's a nice analogy. In a professional setting, spiking on research is time constraint always, and if you start to meandre too much, you will deplete a reputation. But on your own, and with clear goals, as someone here mentioned, by all means dig in as much as you desire if it fulfills you.

On a thread about rabbit holes, it seems safe to suggest that “peddle” was the verb you were looking for.

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