Comment by hardwaregeek | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hardwaregeek | Hacker News Reader

Much respect for Dan's minimalist site (can't say I've ever waited for it to load) but this much CSS makes it so much more readable:

  html {
      display: flex;
      flex-direction: column;
      align-items: center;
      line-height: 1.2em;
      font-size: 1.1em;
  }
  
  body {
      width: 650px
  }

As for the actual content, I agree with it a lot. I suspect most people are quite bad at learning. It's not something that's taught in schools, and when it is, it's probably lost upon kids due to their lack of executive decision making skills.

For instance, I tutor kids in math. I don't think I'm an amazing tutor. My limited bag of tricks are stolen from my teachers. But what I do provide is a fully concentrated hour long study time with feedback. Which is more effective than 10 hours of slightly distracted studying with little to no feedback.

Basically, improvement is a combo of concentration and feedback. Sounds facile but it does work.

There's a great Donald Glover^[1] quote about this:

> “I realized, if I want to be good at P.E., I have to be good at basketball. So I went home and shot baskets in our driveway for six hours, until my mother called me in. The next day, I was good enough that you wouldn’t notice I was bad. And I realized my superpower.”

[1]: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/03/05/donald-glover-...

Any Donald Glover quote is great.

There's something similar with programmers - if you're ever the smartest person in the room, find a new room. If nobody is around thats either better than you or interested enough in order to give you good feedback, then its easy to stagnate. Just being around people who are all pushing hard can lead to a huge increase in skill - I think this is one of the reasons being at a top tier school helps, its the peers you're around who are all doing their best at any point, and the institution that pushes on you as well.

Exactly. That's also what deliberate practice means in the ten thousand hours rule. You keep push yourself or getting pushed and you improve really quickly. People like Carmack can push themselves rigorously so they are the first tier. After all it's bery expensive to hire someone to keep pushing you.

> Dan's minimalist site (can't say I've ever waited for it to load)

He has an article[1] about speeding up his site, too, with the summary:

"I'm not sure what to think about all this. On the one hand, I'm happy that I was able to get a 25x-50x speedup on my site. On the other hand, I associate speedups of that magnitude with porting plain Ruby code to optimized C++, optimized C++ to a GPU, or GPU to quick-and-dirty exploratory ASIC. How is it possible that someone with zero knowledge of web development can get that kind of speedup by watching one presentation and then futzing around for 25 minutes? I was hoping to maybe find 100ms of slack, but it turns out there's not just 100ms, or even 1000ms, but 10000ms of slack in a Octopress setup. According to a study I've seen, going from 1000ms to 3000ms costs you 20% of your readers and 50% of your click-throughs. I haven't seen a study that looks at going from 400ms to 10900ms because the idea that a website would be that slow is so absurd that people don't even look into the possibility. But many websites are that slow!4"

[1] https://danluu.com/octopress-speedup/

Oh man. I can't unsee this now.

Why is the text so close to the edge of the screen? It's the same feeling when the gravy is about to touch my dessert.

You posted

> I suspect most people are quite bad at learning. It's not something that's taught in schools, and when it is, it's probably lost upon kids due to their lack of executive decision making skills.

And then you said tutor kids. Do you find your previous statement to be true? Are most of the kids quite bad a learning and do most of the kids lack executive decision making skills?

Or did I mis-understand? I was expecting that after you said "most people are ..." and that you tutor kids that you find the kids match your statement about "most people"

Yeah totally. I don't mean that as a slight against the kids, but they do have poor executive decision making skills and they are not amazing at learning. As did I in high school and middle school. Brain development plays a factor. The commonly cited fact is that executive function is still developing in teenagers and young adults. I'd also argue that teenagers are often sleep deprived or facing other challenges that make school hard to prioritize (dating, drama in social life, change in familial dynamics, etc).

I think schools and many adults have it completely backwards when they see that kids struggle to get their homework done, get enough sleep, handle extracurriculars and have some sort of social life, and blame the kids' lack of organization or lack of proper education. Blaming a teenager's lack of organization is like blaming a toddler struggling to walk. They're still developing the necessary coping mechanisms and discipline to handle adult life.

But what should be the skin in the game for the teenagers then in order for them to actually learn something from that experience?

They may be blamed for the wrong reasons; but blame is what’s supposed to push them

I don't know. But I don't believe blame is a good impetus. I spent a lot of my high school experience stressed and blaming myself for my inability to work inhuman and inhumane hours. Only in retrospect have I realized that I was not at fault. Only now have I understood that working so hard with so little sleep on tasks I find so uninteresting is not admirable in the slightest.

This will only get worse. It's becoming harder and harder for students to get accepted to colleges, which in turn means the bar for them is rising, often to ridiculous levels. The students who make it to the high levels are not the smart, charismatic future leaders of tomorrow. They are neurotic, depressed, sleep deprived and scared. They are pushing themselves to ridiculous, unhealthy limits for whatever reasons. And by selecting them and placing them in the same school, the same room, we are only concentrating these qualities.

I don't know what we should use to push students forward. But I know that teenagers these days could use less blame.

I always end up hitting Firefox’s readability mode button when reading Dan’s site. Normal browser width is just too wide for wall-to-wall text.

looks perfect on mobile.

Thanks for the reminder, reads much easier on mobile Safari reader mode.

the width of the body should be like the following so that it behaves nicely on mobile phones

body { max-width: 650px; }

Good catch. I just wrote this CSS for my computer but I suppose for other devices you'd need to adjust that

Computers too fwiw. I tried your CSS on my PC, but I had the page up side-by-side with something else and the text overflowed the page.

edit: that didn't entirely make sense, so I looked again and I was zoomed it a couple of notches.

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