Comment by epolanski
21 hours ago
I like the idea, and you've got yourself a customer :)
The lifetime membership + launch discount was a good marketing bait I felt for.
Not really understanding the negativity here. We know for a fact that most of the people that master intellectual problems do so via pattern recognition, not by reasoning.
You show a chess master a position, he/she can instantly tell you what the best moves are without "thinking" or "calculating" because it's mostly pattern recognition.
Maths and algorithms fall in the same category. When approaching new problems, masters don't really start processing the information and reasoning about it, instead they use pattern recognition to find what are very similar problems.
The thing I really don't like is the lack of TypeScript or at least JavaScript, which are the most common languages out there. I really don't enjoy nor use Java/Python/C++.
> We know for a fact that most of the people that master intellectual problems do so via pattern recognition, not by reasoning.
Where is this fact stated, and who are "we" here? Sounds like an opinion or guess at best.
> Not really understanding the negativity here
There are two comments that could be read negativily, the rest is neutral or positive. I don't really understand the constant need for people to bring up what (they think) the rest of the comments said. Post your piece adding positivity if you want, but most of the time comments end up a fair mix so any time someone adds a snippet like that, it turns outdated in a few hours.
There's lots of psychological and anthropological studies behind the fact that most experts in various fields excel due to pattern recognition not reasoning.
Going back to the chess example, while chess masters are incredible at analyzing complex positions they can recognize as "similar to", their advantage over normal human beings is very small when positions are completely randomized.
"Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise", by Ericsson goes more in depth of the topic, but there's lots of literature on the topic.
> There's lots of psychological and anthropological studies behind the fact that most experts in various fields excel due to pattern recognition not reasoning.
Pattern recognition in experts comes from combination of theoretical understanding and a lot of practical problem solving experience (which translates into patterns forming in way of neural paths) - not the other way around. If you dont understand the problem you are solving, then yes maybe you'll be able to throw a pattern at it and with a bit of luck solve it (kinda like how LLMs operate), but this will not lead to understanding. Memorising patterns isolated from theoretical backgrounds is not something that will create an expert in a field.
> their advantage over normal human beings is very small when positions are completely randomized.
The book you referenced does not say they're comparable to normal players at playing from a random position.
Normal players are almost as good as them at recalling a nonsensical board of random pieces.
The suggestion that the advantage of a chess master over a normal player is "very small" at playing from a random position is laughable.
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> Not really understanding the negativity here. We know for a fact that most of the people that master intellectual problems do so via pattern recognition, not by reasoning.
> The lifetime membership + launch discount was a good marketing bait I felt for.
The negativity here with me is because it feels like clickbait and like a scammy ad to manipulate me into purchasing.
It is almost lying. I find it unethical and I don't think there are 17 lifetime access spots, it's just artificial hype that doesn't make sense to me.
Marketing (at least like this) is basically lying.
I agree fully, which is why I called it a (good) marketing bait. Worked on me.
Might be because I'm also considering finding new clients/jobs, and apparently even for 2/3 months of collaborations people are sending me through several rounds of algo questions, so it was a nice add on top of my leetcode and codewars drills.
Thank you, I really appreciate you signing up.
I agree with you on pattern recognition. AlgoDrill is built around taking patterns people already understand and turning them into something their hands can write quickly under pressure. You rebuild the solution line by line with active recall, small objectives, and first principles explanations after each step, so it is more than just memorizing code.
You are also right about the language gap. Right now the drills are Python first, but I am already working on full support for JavaScript, Java, and C++ across all problems, and I will have all of those in by the end of this year. I want people to be able to practice in the language they actually use every day, so your comment helps a lot.
Another +1 for TypeScript from a new lifetime subscriber. Great site!
I don't know if I feel any negativity, but this is the first time I actually thought 'the price of subscription is approximately equal the price of Opus tokens needed to build a custom version of this for myself'... and got a bit scared TBH
> approximately equal the price of Opus tokens needed to build
this is probably not accidental.
Agree with your overall message, but I don't think thats true for chess. Chess players wouldnt be spending an hour on their own move in a match where theyve been been studying the board for hours already if it were that simple
> Not really understanding the negativity here.
In the last year or so HN seems to have attracted a lot of people (plus some bots) who seem to have been socialized on Reddit.
I don't know if these people are ignorant of what a good discussion forum can be (because they've never experienced one) or just don't care, but I do wish we could see more reflection on the second-order impacts of posting, and a move away from the reflexive negativity that mimics the outer face of good criticism while totally missing the thought and expertise good criticism requires.
I've been around here for over a decade. I'm telling you, this has been happening for longer than a year. I'd say the last ~4 years.