When HN users recommended it
1 HN user recommended this in 2014, in one comment.
20072026
Each tall tick is one HN user's first recommendation. A short tick is the same user again. Click a tick to jump to the comment.
1 HN user recommended this in 2014, in one comment.
Each tall tick is one HN user's first recommendation. A short tick is the same user again. Click a tick to jump to the comment.
I've often wondered what made Steve Jobs say that "Programming teachers you how to think" and here's what I've come up with. Programmers think in terms of orders of magnitude and have a strong ability to branch out.
Here's a good example:
My friend has a business selling essential oils (Eucalyptus, Lavender, Sandalwood) on Amazon. This turns out to be a pretty decent business for one simple freakonomics'ish reason I believe. Let me illustrate:
You can sell 10ML of oil:
http://www.amazon.com/Lavender-100%25-Therapeutic-Grade-Esse...
For nearly the same price as you can sell 3 times the amount:
http://www.amazon.com/Woolzies-Lavender-100%25-Pure-Essentia...
I think the reason for this discrepancy is people can't do conversions between milliliters and ounces in their head, and since they can't hold the oils in their hands and only have a picture for reference, they use the price itself to determine the value of what they're getting.
Now back to thinking like a programmer: Upon hearing this, a programmer's first instinct wouldn't be to start a competing line of business but rather would be to come up with a systematic way of scouring Amazon's entire inventory for a multitude of such arbitrage opportunities. He'd branch out to using weight in addition to volume.
In addition to exploring the details, programming gives you practice in seeing the big picture and branching out at all levels of the system.