Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by yeleti 2922 days ago
While i agree with most of them, i would strongly recommend against “Work backwards”. While this has helped me initially in mathematics, it took extreme effort to get rid of this habit.
3 comments

Explain more why this is bad. I think it's very useful. In school, I used to say I reverse engineered a problem by finding way back from solution to the problem. Solving a problem from both ends is a reasonable way to get new ideas.
I actually used this very technique to go from struggling in undergraduate math to top 8% of my class in less than two semesters. Peeking at the answers is fine as long as you aren't "cheating" -- you just have to put in the effort to fully understand the processes and then practice applying them on your own with other completely unfamiliar problems.
Just curious, why is this such a bad habit?