FinnLobsienan hour ago
I think constraints essentially force you to reevaluate the thing from base principles because you add a condition that’s incompatible with the default way of doing things.
I think this is also why hackathons work: You can’t afford the bikeshedding we often do to avoid the hard work because you need to ship something by a deadline 1/500th of most of your normal deadlines, so all of your effort is concentrated into what moves the core work forward.
What gets proven in hackathons often become features, products, or companies later - even if they’re things that would be ruled out in any planning meeting because they seem too hard/laborious.
hny6epwg93an hour ago
I disagree but respect the reasoning
01284a7e2 hours ago
"fusillades of acronyms"...
Fusillades? No ten year old knows that word.
rpdillonan hour ago
The blog post isn't directed at 10-year-olds. In fact, you're pulling a phrase from a paragraph that's describing exactly how you should not speak when talking to a 10-year-old.
> The simplest constraint for anyone trying to explain a complex topic is to accept the request to “explain it to me like I’m 10 years old”. What’s packed into that request is, vividly exaggerated, the reminder that what seems obvious to an expert is often incomprehensible to the listener. Technical jargon and fusillades of acronyms are often used to convey an explanation that has been denuded of all the foundations and context that might allow it to make sense.
01284a7ean hour ago
My point stands. The author can't explain explaining it like I'm ten like I'm ten.
nemosaltatan hour ago
It might be helpful to note that this article was written for the FT (as he mentions at the very bottom.) While it aphoristically may make a “pre out of you and me,” I presume neither the author, nor the subscribership of FT _are_ indeed (or wish to be) constrained to the language of a typical 10-year-old. Presumably the same would apply to the readership of HN.
We don’t know if the author _can_ explain it like we’re ten, but I think we can be reasonably certain they understandably chose not to.
AnimalMuppetan hour ago
Ten-year-olds don't need advice on how to explain something like the listener is ten.
Chris204843 minutes ago
Is "explaining it like I'm ten" a complex topic?
atoavan hour ago
Good thing they never claimed to be writing in that style then. Not sure what you're working yourself up over here. Authors are allowed to write about a method of writing without having to apply it themselves.
rzzztan hour ago
It's when multiple soldiers are ordered to fire their guns very quickly, either everyone at once or one after another.
ranger_dangeran hour ago
I don't think the article itself was intended to be written for a 10-year-old to understand it.
nemosaltatan hour ago
Neither did the author
> If you are reading this column you definitely aren’t a typical 10-year-old, but the image of the bewildered 10-year-old gives the expert an anchor to help them slow down and simplify [0]
[0] TFA
vova_hn231 minutes ago
I think that the author is doing it deliberately, to put the reader in the shoes of someone who has a hard time understanding some of the words, and reinforce his point.
As a non-native English speaker there are 4 words in this article that I had to look up, which is significantly higher than a typical article from HN frontpage (usually it's 0, occasionally 1).
If anyone curious, the words are: pellucid, fusillades, pram (idk, why I never heard it. I knew the word "stroller", of course, but I never thought about different kinds of strollers), octogenarian (this one I could have guessed from Latin roots and context, was lazy).
hn_go_brrrrr8 minutes ago
Pram is common in British English. I'm guessing you learned US English, which doesn't use it.
KineticLensman5 minutes ago
Yes, as slang for ‘perambulator’, which is basically ‘stroller’
nemosaltatan hour ago
Indeed, TFA isn’t exactly pellucid