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Ask HN: What concept opened your mind to a new world?

by ryeguy_24 on 5/28/23, 8:10 PM with 5 comments

I recently learned about two things that really opened my mind up to a new way of thinking about things.

1) learning about radio communications (including the Fast Fourier transform) and how all wireless communications use modulated radio waves to send information and

2) taking the Nand2Tetris course and learning about the basic components of a CPU working together to execute lines of code.

Both of these just really made me understand things differently. I’d love to know what other topics (math, computer science, electronics, anything) people found to be eye opening and changed their perspective.

  • by dangitnotagain on 5/28/23, 9:43 PM

    Math; after a middling life at math it “occurred” to me that math isn’t about “numbers of things” rather relationships of proportions of things. Manifold special distributions, inverse square laws of field propagation, base conversions (like spotting the “Q.E.D” error of 1 == 0.99999999; as 10/10 - 1/9, a base trick), etc.

    Structural engineering, that the moment of force is a superposition of force distribution which determines the life of structural performance.

    And human intelligence, that really humanity is faking intelligence; we get by on averaging our failures and congratulating our inevitable success (persistence.)

  • by meristohm on 5/28/23, 9:41 PM

    That I'm worthy of love and that it's okay to feel all my feelings, including happiness; these realizations helped me recognize and relinquish a lot of childhood baggage and get out of my own way.

  • by jjgreen on 5/28/23, 8:17 PM

    Axiomatics. Take some common features of concrete objects as axioms and study abstract objects which satisfy those axioms.

  • by okl on 5/28/23, 9:14 PM

    Understanding that a .zip file can be seen as a program that's interpreted by the decompressor.

  • by 777asdfjkl on 5/28/23, 9:07 PM

    1. Transform digit pcm audio file to real sound 2. assembler