Also the fact that a theory is refutable. That a theory is not _the_ truth, but the best explanation so far and if something proves it completely or partially wrong then we move on to the new, better theory.
This comment makes me think of the Gell-Mann amnesia effect but applied to comments. If I was unaware of what has been happening for the past few weeks I would find this comment reasonable and well nuanced. I realize that many times I read something on hn on a subject I know almost nothing about and leave thinking I've learned something.
This is why I like to watch YouTube tutorials sometimes, especially when I’m new to a certain topic. They show every step clearly. The author can’t forget to mention a piece of information because he’s doing it in real time. Too often with written tutorials there’s one or more steps missing, that are obvious to the author but not necessarily to someone new to the subject.
Yes although this requires the author to assess what they are showing to see if it makes sense from a teaching / learning perspective.
I remember watching a tutorial about a new feature in Photoshop. The author
* showed some results
* showed how the older version of the feature worked (assuming we were all familiar with it)
* did 'undo' multiple times to get back to the original image
* started showing the sequence of steps to use the new feature
* realised they had made a mistake and undid some of the steps
* restarted from the point where they had made the mistake.
I had to watch this about five times to work out the actual minimal sequence of steps involved. Some editing or a retake would really have helped here.
John Sarno's book "The Mind Body Prescription" is the book that's always mentioned on HN when this topic comes up. But there's a more up to date book with actual science to back up what you described, it's called "The Way Out" by Alan Gordon. In this book he uses the term "neuroplastic pain" for those sort of pains, it's also called central sensitization in some research papers.
Anyone suffering from any sort of chronic pain should give this book or a similar book a try.
Similar to you, I convinced myself out a chronic tendonitis that would just not disappear even after physical therapy. It was gone a few weeks later. Just by following the recommendations in the book. It's basically self talk therapy.
Such a "truest" formula doesn't really exist, or at least what you determine to be the truest is just a matter of definition and taste.
For any equation it's mathematically trivial to come up with a different set of equations that produce the same result, e.g. for example just via approximating the original function with some infinite series that is guaranteed to give back the original result in the limit.
But even beyond such trite examples, it's not unlikely that there will simply be multiple competing ways to model the same data that the equation takes in and spits out that are very different in form and function, and perhaps even in mathematically incompatible ways (this could happen if e.g. the equations model more than what exists in reality but all of reality is described by some subset of the parameters of these equations, like how gravity works for negative masses but such a thing does not exist from what we know).
You could then decide on some reasonable criteria which of all your models is the truest one, but the criteria themselves will be up for subjective debate.
>There is quite a bit of open source software out there with bugs, bad documentation, and bad design; simply because fixing those problems is a real hassle.
Onboarding is a barrier to entry too. For example, yesterday I read a blog article saying that the Rust project Cargo doesn't have enough volunteers. Learning Rust at the moment and looking for a new project, I checked out the "how to contribute" section and looked at the issues on their github repo, but honestly it's daunting. I've submitted a few fixes to some project documentation in the past because those are some of the easiest tasks, but I'm yet to found a small enough crack in a big open source project to jump in and submit a pull request.
IMO QEMU is a nice spot between important, straightforward to contribute and relatively understaffed compared to how widely it is used. I have found multiple behavior/stability issues that I’ve fixed on my own (exposed though OSdev-adjacent work) and submitted to the mailing list
That's my main takeaway so far. It helps me get started. Having a piece of code that might be wrong but that I can refactor is easier than starting from blank.
