Ask HN: What bits of fundamental knowledge are 10x productivity multipliers?
by stardustpie on Hacker News.
I recently realized that certain kinds of knowledge allow one to be significantly more productive when solving a large class of problems. For example, * Regular expressions for simple text processing. * Parser combinators for parsing. * Parser generators (esp. packrat variety) for parsing. * The concept of fuzzing and property testing for testing code. * Calculus for solving all sorts of problems. * MCMC for solving a huge class of probability problems. * Search algorithms for solving a variety of problems (e.g. all NP-hard problems, sudoku, HTNs, scheduling, planning). * Gradient descent for solving a variety of optimization problems. * Vector Space embedding as a conceptual tool for a variety of complex AI problems. * Effect composition (Haskell’s IO or Scala’s ZIO) as an incredibly powerful paradigm for concurrency and parallelism. What are some examples of 10x multipliers that come to your mind? Fundamental ideas without which you would be drastically less productive.