Frequently asked questions

Some frequently asked and also less frequently asked questions. Updated every once in a while. This is basically an advice page.

Before internalizing anything from this page, my foremost advice is to ignore all advice you don’t agree with, including this. During high school I made the unfortunate decision to listen to the advice of many, many anonymous internet kind strangers as well as classmates who were far more mediocre than myself. For instance, be highly wary of advice of this form, especially in high school.

X class is too hard. You should take Y as an easy A.

There’s no way X is possible.

You have to be X to do Y, and you’re not X.

I am an idiot, so also be wary of advice from me.

For convenience, quickly jump down to: programming FAQs, school & college FAQs.

Programming

1. What programming language should I learn first?
   Doesn’t matter. Pick a language, write some code. If you want to end up in corporate, try JavaScript or Python. If you want to be an elite hacker, try Rust or a Lisp dialect. If you don’t even like programming and happen to be a mathematician, try Haskell.

2. I don’t know how to even get started with X. How can I learn?
   I don’t have an easy answer. But I will offer a warning.

   Be mindful of tutorial hell. Most people have no idea how to get started with most projects and naturally gravitate towards comprehensive tutorials. I find that you blindly follow tutorials to their end product you may not end up getting much out. At the very least, you should try to restart after the tutorial and do whatever you wanted from scratch under your own direction, perhaps consulting the tutorial only as a reference.

   Learning how to learn is probably harder than many concepts in undergraduate computer science. After you pass a certain threshold of learning ability, you will be able to dispense with tutorials altogether and research stacks and ideas which you can piece together yourself through code samples and documentation, which is one of the most powerful skills.

3. How can I get started with hackathons?
   I think hackathons are less valuable as technical competitions and far more valuable as small meetups to meet hackers and build cool sh*t. Once you stop thinking about winning the hackathon and just as an excuse to show up and make something cool, suddenly they’re far more palatable. In general, I find that if you actually like hacking and have genuine ability, things will fall into place.

   Corollary: be very wary of hackathons where everyone is showing up to build B2B AI SaaS and have the most “impressive” looking project.

4. How do I become cracked?
   (For the boomers: cracked in this context means someone who is insanely good at programming or academics in general.)

   Well, I’m not sure I’m the right person to ask, but some people seem to believe I’m some level of “cracked.” My general advice is to stop thinking about it and try to learn as much as you can whenever you can. Thinking too hard about these things is detrimental to your mental health. There is no formula.

   For further consideration, MIT Admissions’ Applying Sideways is so overrecommended but still so salient, and the general theme applies to so much more than just MIT admissions. Want to do X which seems intractable? Focus on learning doing as much as you can related to X for its own sake, and you just might end up achieving X. In the (honestly likely) event that you don’t? You might achieve impressive result Y instead, and worst case you’ve learned and done a bunch of things which are fruitful in their own right.

   Also read the similar post applying sideways, beyond admissions which further expands upon this.

School & college

1. How’s ucsb?
   I think this quote sums it up nicely. I replaced all occurrences of the word “electrochemistry” with “ucsb.”

   Go to party planet. Love and be loved by drugs.

   Cool for: High-Fliers, Party Enthusiasts, Cops who need Lightning

   ucsb is the animal within you, the beast longing to be unleashed to indulge and enjoy. It enables you to take drugs with fewer negative side-effects. It also enables you to better investigate lurid matters – if you need to understand a chemical breakdown, or talk to someone blasted out of their mind, or understand sexual dynamics, ucsb is there to guide you.

   At high levels, ucsb makes you a man of unrestrained pleasure – an unrepentant Lothario who leers at people with a bottle of speed and a plastic bendy straw in either hand. Without a working knowledge of drugs and sex, the city will be difficult to understand.

   — Electrochemistry from Disco Elysium