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Comment by jmhammond | Hacker News Reader

> But there’s also a part of me that’s just like, how can you not be curious? How can you write Python for 5 years of your life and never look at a bit of source code and try to understand how it works, why it was designed a certain way, and why a particular file in the repo is there? How can you fit a dozen regressions and not try to understand where those coefficients come from and the linear algebra behind it? I dunno, man.

This is true everywhere. As a professor, every semester I’m baffled by students who aren’t curious. But I’ve come to terms that there is a difference between those who will graduate and go on to be readers of hacker news and write this kind of article, and those who won’t.

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To counter your professor opinion. The amount of extra time available as a student that I had to pursue things of interest was in the negative. All academic time was spent getting course content accomplished.

I am a naturally curious individual but time limitations prevent further exploration in most circumstances. Additionally there is a relevancy factor weighed on top of it. If something looks curious I have to pre-determine if I think the time spent pursuing that rabbit hole has any value to it. Granted you never know the outcome - it is alway a gamble.

Well good luck then, in my experience the most free time I've ever had in my life was during college. I squandered massive amounts of that time doing things completely unrelated to education, and I definitely don't regret doing that. College isn't just about book learning after all. But still, BY FAR, college is the time of my life when I had the most free time to do whatever I wanted.

Middle and high school is where a lot of students learn to stop being curious due to a lack of time. College demands far fewer hours per day, but it can be hard to forget what was taught previously.

idk, college for me demanded a lot more hours per day than middle and high school, not less

I have to agree with you. So many of my professors have been vocally disappointed with their students for their lack of intellectual curiosity after it had been beaten out of them through the overstuffed schedules and pointless busy work of K–12.

If you are someone who is on the cusp of a better grade at university then any curiosity time is better invested in restudying the past exam papers. I think PhD has more of a curiosity culture at least in the first year but I never did one.

Also hard subjects at uni - there is only so much deep thinking you can do per day

It depends on your courseload that semester. When I was taking organic chemistry I would spend a good 8 hours in the library a day monday-thursday on top of class, which would open the weekend up for partying. Wake up at 10 for class at 11, then straight to the library with the occasional break for meals or other classes until 11pm or so, whenever I got too tired to continue. By my senior year when I was just taking interesting electives, I was totally coasting, probably throwing in 2 hours a week in the library in total.

We’re you working whilst you were in college?

I worked 10-15 hours a week (and somewhat more in the Summer) for about three years of college and can confirm, still the most free time and lowest stress ever. Worst, by a mile, was high school, and I even had a pretty good experience there. Far worse than working a full time job while having multiple young kids, even. Worse than before we had kids but when we made very little money and struggled to pay the bills every month. High school is terrible.

That’s impressive. Between work (30 hours a week) and classes (full time credit load), I’ve never had less free time than when I was in college. And I’m speaking now as someone with 2 young kids and a full time job. Something tells me your experience is not commensurate with the standard college experience. Perhaps you didn’t have a full time job or only took part time credits?

> Something tells me your experience is not commensurate with the standard college experience.

I know very few university students with significant work commitments.

In the US, the stereotypical college student is not also holding down any kind of job. Maybe 5-7 hours of "work study" (light work running the reference desk at the library or working in the dining hall).

Frankly, I doubt the majority could do learn a lot and also work a significant number of job hours.

At a community college, it would be very different - most students also holding down jobs, I would guess. At a flagship state university, I would be very suprised.

Evidence in [1]... about 30% of full time students are working 20+ hours/week. Also apparently I was wrong about the low hours being typical; less than 10% are working but < 10 hours/week.

[1] https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/pdf/coe_ssa.pdf

Yeah, this. I don't have any data to support this, but when I was in school, MOST people didn't have close to full-time jobs. I had a job where I probably worked 10 hours during the week at night and some full 8 hour shifts on the weekends. Most of the people I went to school with (and I would assume, maybe wrongly, that most people in better schools than I went to) didn't work AT ALL while they were in school, it was just those of us less than wealthy folk who actually had to work to have spending money and money to pay for books etc. I don't think my work load was overly demanding, but I was a Comp Sci major, fwiw.

Happy to be wrong here. It sucks to think I had the standard experience given how difficult and draining it was.

Same. Even with a full course load and working over 40 hours a week.

No kids, no sports, no community involvement, no side hustles, no expectations.

I had quite a lot of free time when in college, but I still feel like I had less time to pursue my interests. Reason being that the course itself was intellectually demanding while also being quite prescribed about what you had to learn. Meaning I ended up using all my mental capacity grinding through a bunch of stuff that my professors wanted me to learn, leaving me with much less time to go off and learn what interested me.

Both before and since I've had more free capacity to pursue learning for it's own sake.

This was true for my undergrad, but my graduate program demands almost all of my free time, including weekends. Although, this may mostly be due to a drastic change in field of study from the two (social science to computer science) where I probably have to dedicate more time than those that already have knowledge/experience in this field.

Yeah I hardcore disagree with this. Partly my fault for saying yes too much, partly my work schedule, partly being in a weed out program that really worked you to the bone.

Some semesters I was doing like 70-80 hours a week on average, split between managing clubs, homework, attending class, working part time jobs, studying. One week I remember being busy from 7am to 2am for 6 days straight. a few semesters I had a lot of free time, like second semester of senior year, and first semester of freshman year, but mainly it was the gaps - after midterms, during breaks, where I had obscene amounts of free time.

This was also my case... but tbh. I was the only one of the many thousands I met in the university...

Interesting. I had a very different experience. Double major, working in two labs simultaneously, active member of local ACM, interned with local startup during the school year, volunteered at a local soup kitchen. All that together was about 50 hours/week. Academics (including homework, studying, etc) was only 25 hrs/week on average. But I was very fortunate to have the advantage of not needing to work, which gave me the freedom to scale back my hours on a particularly busy week.

I learned a lot from my CS classes, but I actually felt like most of the value from the degree came from overhearing random chitchat between professors or other students and the reading more about those ideas and experimenting with them in my free time.

My sense is that your program at school had a light work load - so a difference in experience. My peak workload so far in my life was at college - I had over 40 hours of class time a week which you then have to add on homework, projects and exams. It was a grind.

Since then workload has been intense of course but never comparable. I've had much more time to be able to explore personal interests since college.

That's at least 3 times a normal amount of class time in the U.S. at places such as Ivy League colleges, MIT, etc.

40 hours of class time a week is absurd

Where did you study? I was working full time while doing the university... It was HARD... but I was nowhere nearly 40Hs of class a week... unless you do the whole university in 2 years?!

Yeah, I wish I'd had "free time" in college. 60-70 hour work weeks were normal - 20 hours a week in class and then a full-time load of courseworks / readings / labs etc. I couldn't afford to take time off on weekends for the first 3.5 years. It was horrendous.

Once I started full-time work it was like a revelation - finally I don't have to work on evenings and weekends! I actually get free time to myself! I can have hobbies!

Sounds like you weren’t in a competitive program that constantly tried to get people to drop from college altogether.

I was. Didn’t have anywhere near the free time and the lack of stress I do post-college. Helps that I also make a good chunk of change rather than living off a relatively small stipend in one of the most expensive cities in the world.

Not my experience at all. Proper studying takes a lot of intense work, far more than I've ever needed to put in in my post-graduation working life.

I think this inclination to be curious can still be apparent even when someone doesn't have the time to pursue that inclination. It will be more subtle, but I think it's something rather fundamental that applies in broad ways across our lives.

Yes, you can tell even in the smallest chats. The tone convey desire / curiosity or the lack thereof.

Did you happen to attend a prestigious school? I find that the level of rigor (and corresponding freedom) varies tremendously from program to program.

I did my undergrad at a state school with a middling engineering program, where I had ample free time to explore topics in depth, pursue extracurriculars that taught me far more than my classes, and have a thriving social life.

Contrast that experience to what I saw as a teaching assistant at Georgia Tech: undergrads who are so full of classwork that they're punting on the least-valuable graded assignments, never mind extracurriculars. The level of rigor in courses is much higher, but it presses out freedom to explore independently.

Another datapoint: I competed against GT extracurricular teams during my undergrad years, and we beat them handily almost every time because their students couldn't justify high effort for work that wasn't graded. I once saw a GT team arrive a day late to a competition, work on a robot for three hours at the adjacent table, realize their robot did not work, and drive home without competing.

Nope, nope and nope again. I refute this utterly, as a teaching academic.

Contact hours at most universities are around 2-4 hours per week per 15-credit module. To gain a degree, you have to take 120 credits a year, typically two terms of 4 x 15 credit modules, or 8-16 hours of contact per week maximum with the entire summer off.

You therefore have at least 24 hours a week to study on your own to bring your working week up to 40 hours. Maybe you're working, fair enough. But if you don't have time to study subjects in depth then you need to reduce your working hours. If you can't, then by definition you are not a full-time student.

This is not a personal attack on you. Perhaps you were genuinely studious and spent all your time poring over the coursework. It is a commentary on the whole academic sector where we repeatedly see students do nothing for most of the time and spend the last 2 weeks cramming and putting in substandard assessments, then blame the course material/their lecturers/their anxiety etc. for their poor results. And of course the leadership teams lap it up and tell us to make our courses easier.

No personal attack taken but your experience and points fail to win me over.

The difference probably belies in the rigor of the program. It sounds like you are working in a non-engineering based program. In our engineering programs we had 40 hours of class time + lab time per week.

I had a concurrent arts degree at the same time which is was, in comparison, incredibly light workload - though concurrently it took time away.

The only time that I will say was much lighter was in the final year of undergrad - the course load finally lightened up.

N.B. this whole conversation clearly excludes summer.

You posted this elsewhere in the thread, where I replied that this is not normal in the U.S. Can I ask what university and degree program it is where students have 40 hours of class and lab time per week?

They mentioned engineering programs in their comment.

40 hours isn't normal even for engineering programs. Every engineering program I've looked at has higher course hour and credits required. Obviously I haven't looked at every single engineering program at every engineering school, so there probably exists some counter example showing it's no different than arts or science..

Where I studied, we had one semester with 40.5 hours of lecture, lab, and tutorials. One other semester was around 38 or 39 hours. The rest were in the mid-twenties for lecture, lab, tutorial. My program wasn't the typical engineering program, but all of the other engineering schools where I went (Western Canada) did require more credits and more class hours than science and arts and business programs. There may have been some exceptions with honors programs (meaning they have to take 132 credits vs 120 credits and write a thesis) in arts and science that put them closer to engineering programs, but these have limited enrollment.

> The difference probably belies in the rigor of the program.

This is anecdata of course, but my experience with a top-3 US undergrad aerospace engineering program in the late-90s, early 2000s was around 15-16 hours of class time per week, sometimes increasing to 18-19 or so with labs. Work outside of class was 3x this or maybe 4x around midterms or finals.

Where do you teach? Where I have gone, 1 credit meant 1 hr of lecture and an expected 2 hr of study outside of lecture. Therefore 15 credits means 45 hours a week of study before you get curious about your field.

For example here is Purdue's handbook on credit guidelines:

https://www.purdue.edu/registrar/forms/Semester_Credit_Hours...

Were you working at a job in college? Full-time or part-time?

I see lots of concurring and dissenting opinions here, and will add one more:

For context, I double majored in two adjacent subjects, physics and math. I went to a state school that has a very strong physics program. I also worked in physics lab for the last ~2 years, and graduated a semester early. While I did OK academically, I had no desire to run the gauntlet again in grad school, and left to work in tech.

I have never, ever, been as a busy as I was in college, nor do I ever want to be. I think that's a good thing! I have much more time to explore things that don't pan out, to do things I know are not "productive" (i.e, play video games), and am generally happier.

Apart from quality of life improvements, I think there are additional financial and intellectual benefits to not being overly burdened -- the time to explore topics that were not immediately adjacent to my field of study results in extremely useful skill development and better cross-pollination of ideas.

> The amount of extra time available as a student that I had to pursue things of interest was in the negative. All academic time was spent getting course content accomplished.

Did you go to a "good" school?

I went to a mediocre one for undergrad and a top school for grad. The one glaring difference I saw between the two: The top school's undergrad program gave students way, way too much busy work. All that work didn't give any insights, and was merely used to artificially distinguish students for grades. Their grad program was nothing like this.

Really glad I went to a mediocre school. Still learned everything, but had plenty of time to explore.

You must have been a very sincere and disciplined student. :)

In my case, when I was studying, I had all the time in the world. During that time, I did try to learn many things but I didn't go deep or weren't consistent. I mostly wasted times in goofing around. Looking back, the amount of time I wasted during college years has become a biggest pain of my current life when I don't have any skill or time to learn those skills.

Because there's a lot of things out there which are also interesting, and you don't have time to do all of them, so you choose. And different people choose differently.

I’m surprised I had to scroll so far to find this response.

It was a revelation to me when I realized that, no, it’s not that “most people” lack intellectual curiosity. Their interests are just different than mine.

I'm pretty curious, but I wonder whether I would have come across that way that my college professors. I felt like college stifled my curiosity. Undergraduate courses rarely care about original or creative work, or about students pursuing their individual interests. They more or less want students to learn what the authorities in the field think.

I did student representation while I was at college, so I had quite a bit of contact with teaching staff around discussing the learning process. There were a lot of complaints from their side that students weren't engaging with the course and were rote learning answers for exams.

My perspective was that most of the courses were badly taught (students were given little guidance and struggled to learn the basics) AND badly examined (you had to guess at what the professor wanted in order to score well - it wasn't actually assessing learning accurately). The courses where you found truly curious students were the ones that taught the basics in a way that other professors would consider hand holding (which meant they could get passed that onto more advanced material), and gave clear advice on what was expected in and how to approach the exam (so that students didn't have to worry about that and could focus on learning and their interests).

You'll always get some students who just aren't interested (perhaps they picked the wrong course, or simply aren't that academic), but you'll also find that the same students respond dramatically differently to different environments.

curiosity is good but there is so much stuff to learn out there that for many fields learning things deeply is much less important than learning a lot at 25-35% depth.

Not everyone is wired that way. Personally, I have taken apart and reassembled most of the tech stuff I have at home simply because it interests me how things work (and broke and repaired a non-negligible amount of them in the process, to add), I've dabbled in repairing cars, gas boilers, do my own electricity work... but in my social circle, I'm pretty much the only one. And as I grew older, managed to land myself an s/o, I kind of get why - two other parts come into play:

The first issue is a lot of acquiring broad-spectrum knowledge involves risking quite an amount of money. A good DSLR cam can easily rack up a few thousand euros, a fully spec'd Mac Pro or larger drones cross the five digits without blinking. Messing around with gas and electricity can kill you, messing with water pipes can cause immense water damage. It takes a lot of ... let's say recklessness to even think about dealing with this if you're not a professional, and you have to have the resources in the first place.

But the real issue is time. Students, at least here in Europe, don't have the luxury of taking six or seven years for their basic diploma - "thanks" to the Bologna reforms, you're fucked if you can't make it in the designed timeframe as you won't be eligible for most kinds of financial aid. That means you simply cannot afford "wasting" a week to get that deep level of knowledge, you simply are happy enough if it runs well enough to get a passing grade. And once you've entered the workforce, it becomes even harder to have actual hobbies. It's one thing if you live alone, no one will bat an eye if you pull in an all-nighter on a weekend with just yourself, a crate of beer and a laptop and that's assuming you're not completely drained from your average 40 hours work week, 10 hours of getting to the workplace, and another 10 hours on domestic chores. When you live together with another person, the game completely changes: they also want time and attention from you - bonus points if your s/o has roughly the same interests that you have (which is why I suspect so many people meet their s/o at work). And with children... forget about hobbies of any kind if you don't have enough resources for either yourself or your s/o to be a stay-at-home parent.

This is why I so strongly advocate for a four-day and six-hour work week, a proper minimum wage and government-subsidized affordable housing for everyone. Just imagine what useful things people could run as side projects if they actually had the time to pull them off, not to mention the obvious physical and mental health benefits of not having to struggle with survival every single day. Add to that the elimination of "bullshit jobs" and an end of wasting the best minds of the world on financial bullshit (i.e. HFT, "quant investment funds") or advertising... or getting rid of racism and other discrimination. We as humanity could make so much more progress if we were not so hell-bent on exploiting each other.

You wrote: <<Students, at least here in Europe, don't have the luxury of taking six or seven years for their basic diploma>>

Is this true in Germany?

Having relatives and friends across Europe (UK, DE, IT, ES, FR, PT) I cannot understand the parent comment (not having enough time for curiosity). I see only "PARTYYY!" in the universities... plenty of free time -- and typically more than enough money. Specially with the "Orgasmus" ehhh sorry! "Erasmus" program. Do I have all friends with 160 IQ? I really doubt it.

> Do I have all friends with 160 IQ?

Rather, you have friends with money. My university circle was not "rich kids", but those who either had to fend for themselves with government assistance or with joint work-study programs ("Duales Studium").

Sadly, for those that depend on BAföG (the government assistance), this is the reality. If you can't manage to finish your study in the expected time ("Regelstudienzeit"), you're out from assistance [1]. If you take double the expected time plus another year, you're forcibly evicted [2], which was quite an issue for some people who were admitted under the pre-Bologna rules [3]. You're also kicked out as well if you fail one course three times [4], which is what hit me as I'm a better hacker than a mathematician.

In the end, it's clear that the Bologna reforms were not just about creating a common European academic standard - which is a good thing - but also about turning universities into factories with no room left anymore for the eccentrics who wanted to spend more time on their education than the system wants, those who need more time for specific subjects or those who need a job to survive and can't keep up the same workload as rich students can.

[1] https://www.xn--bafg-7qa.de/bafoeg/de/das-bafoeg-alle-infos-...

[2] https://www.tuhh.de/tuhh/studium/im-studium/rund-um-den-stud...

[3] https://www.deutschlandfunk.de/zwangsexmatrikulation-fuer-ho...

[4] https://www.gesetze-bayern.de/Content/Document/BayHSchG-49

Hear hear

Seems pretentious to me. I’ve never bothered to look through many things I use. I look extensively at how to use them and what the API offers. I have a good intuition for how most models work. I don’t really care about the specifics of the implementations.

I have more important things to do. The hacker mentality, imo, is about identifying what’s useful for you to explore to accomplish whatever you need. Often that’s a lot of glue between things that other people built. Other times it’s tweaking the internals to do something a bit different.

I agree with you. Super powers are seeing value in doing something, and then finding the easiest and most efficient path to get there.

That said, sometimes I do like to read the code in libraries I use but often this is more for enjoyment with occasionally learning something interesting.

How can you see the value in doing something if you don’t understand the underlying concepts?

It depends. Sometimes for work or personal reasons I just need to get something done and API docs, etc. is all I need for that. And sometimes I dig deep. I have over 50 US patents and enjoy technical work, so sometimes I do dive deep.

That's all fine, as long as you still understand the underlying assumptions and pitfalls. Many people who skim documentation and throw things together haphazardly do not.

Skim documentation != going through repos

If you think it’s about implementation details, you’re misunderstanding. It’s about understanding the principles behind it.

As an example, it’s more about understanding the statistics and linear algebra around estimating uncertainty in GLM regression estimates, than about reading the code for how the statsmodels library implements that.

If you want to understand the intuition behind a model you should read a paper, book, or even a blog before the repo imo.

"it's pretentious to know what you're doing" just be a haxxor xD

This is not about the hacker mentality. This is a researcher mentality from a daily life perspective. Some people just aren’t curious. I like to understand the math and the computing models behind many things I use. That doesn’t mean I want to know what’s happening in Windows internals or something just because I use Windows everyday. But if I’m creating an app connecting to Office DLLs, I want to know what it does beyond “here’s a bunch of methods and constants you can use”.

I’d further argue that the nature of a hacker / power user is to break things apart once you want to get deep enough. If I need to know where in the cluster my instance of some software got lost into, I should be able to investigate all the tools I have available to somehow find it. Not just give up and say some garbage collector will get it for me.

I see what you're saying, but the post above seems to indicate that understanding those models SHOULD be important to you if your job is to run those models and explain results and make corporate decisions based off your forecasts. You shouldn't be just passing data through and thinking that it's not your job to actually understand things. The subtlety matters a lot as the software hitting some edge case could completely skew the results. There is a vague line drawn somewhere that tells you what is necessary to learn and what is superfluous. Finding the line isn't easy, but those that label too much as superfluous will likely get more erroneous results and that is a problem.

With regards to your API statement, I'm just as guilty regarding reading the code, but I do run some manual tests to ensure that my script calling the database actually does what I think it should. Is that good enough? Who knows :)

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