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Ask HN: What was your most humbling learning moment?

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Re: Ask HN: What was your most humbling learning moment?

#271

Post by lelanthran »

stavros wrote: post #202
hu3 wrote: post #83

Learning that some folks can produce so much value with crappy code. I've seen entire teams burn so much money by overcomplicating projects. Bikesheding about how to implement DDD, Hexagonal Architecture, design patterns, complex queues that would maybe one day be required if the company scaled 1000x, unnecessary eventual consistency that required so much machinery and man hours to keep data integrity under control.…

This is a false dichotomy. On one end, you have "overarchitects everything so much that the code is soon unmaintainable" and on the other end you have "architects the code so little that the code is soon unmaintainable". Always write the simplest thing you can, but no simpler. Finding that line is where all the art is.

IME, it's easier to fix the latter than the former, if only because there is a limit to how large the latter can be possibly become.

Small projects are easier to fix than large projects.

Re: Ask HN: What was your most humbling learning moment?

#272

Post by khazhoux »

hu3 wrote: post #83

Learning that some folks can produce so much value with crappy code. I've seen entire teams burn so much money by overcomplicating projects. Bikesheding about how to implement DDD, Hexagonal Architecture, design patterns, complex queues that would maybe one day be required if the company scaled 1000x, unnecessary eventual consistency that required so much machinery and man hours to keep data integrity under control.…

The team that prides themselves on "we'll take a bit longer to get things right" usually winds up takes much, much longer... and still gets it wrong.

By that point, the fast team would be on their third iteration.

Re: Ask HN: What was your most humbling learning moment?

#273

Post by hiAndrewQuinn »

nlh wrote: post #223
nicbou wrote: post #78

In college, meeting someone that was better than me by every conceivable metric. You'd think that he beat me at one thing by neglecting another, but nope, the guy was excelling in every category. Perfect grades, involved in many communities, and generally pleasant to be around. There was no caveat, no excuse. Dude just straight up rocked. I have met more people like that while travelling. I felt badass riding my moto…

The Internet did this to me for a lot of things -- when I was an island, I used to think I was really good at a lot of things: Table tennis, Tetris, some other video games. And relative to my friends and sometimes even the people a few circles away from them, I was! And then, The Internet. And I discovered that I am absolutely NOT good at table tennis. I am not even CLOSE to good at Tetris. And I am TERRIBLE at every…

Step 1 is to realize you're almost certainly not going to be the best in all of spacetime at a thing.

Step 2 is to realize you don't have to be - you can just be the best in a given bubble, centered on the here and now.

Step 3 is getting comfortable realizing you get to choose the size of that bubble, any time you want!

Re: Ask HN: What was your most humbling learning moment?

#274

Post by bionsystem »

jnsie wrote: post #128

Like many other people who should know better, I tried my hand at day-trading. I bought some course by someone who in hindsight I'm certain made more money off selling courses than they ever did off of day-trading. I got my account setup, had enough funds to allow me to trade short timeframes (I forget what this was called but there is a rule where you need X amount of money before you can do more than Y trades in Z…

I had some success trading a long/short stock portfolio, but on longer time periods than day trading (holding positions from few weeks to few months). The fun lasted almost 3 years. Then I shorted META from 300 to 100 and felt on top of the world, it was after shorting a bunch of other "covid success stories" like zoom, moderna, carvana, and making 50%+ return on each in a reasonnably concentrated portfolio. The rest of my portfolio was doing ok as well.

As META kept going down I kept adding to my position (meaning shorting more), and then it came back up. I ended up a loser on the position despite being up almost 70% at some point. I couldn't believe in a recovery for the company.

I then thought "never again" and started to trade options so that I would have a more disciplined, guaranteed stop loss. I lost more than 50% of my margin that year and another 50% 6 month later, so I was back below square 1 at the end of it all. We are talking small numbers (maybe losing 15k in total) but an amazing amount of time and energy spent doing all this which generated a lot of stress.

Re: Ask HN: What was your most humbling learning moment?

#275

Post by jasonkester »

I lived in Pamplona, Spain for a year, back before my Spanish was particularly good. It was a pretty amazing place, with all its narrow cobbled alleys and small shops.

They had a particular style of bread in a few of the shops, kind of a rustic baguette with pointy ends, that I never could find the name of. I'd always have to point and say "that one", which always felt awkward. Worse, my Spanish wasn't yet good enough to even ask what it was called in a way they'd understand.

So imagine my good fortune one morning when I pointed at it in my favorite bread shop and the man picked it up and said "Pan de Ayer".

Pan de Ayer! Finally, I had a name for it. "Ayer!", I said with a big grin. I love Ayer bread. It's my favorite. Please give me a bar of Pan de Ayer.

The man did seem a bit taken aback by my enthusiasm for this particular style of bread, as did the other customer in the shop. But he rang me up after ensuring that it was in fact what I wanted. I held it up, made some yummy noises, said one more "Ayer", and walked out.

I made it maybe 50 yards up the road before I remembered where I'd heard that word.

We lived there another 9 months, and I don't think I ever went back to that shop.

Re: Ask HN: What was your most humbling learning moment?

#276

Post by refulgentis »

deanrtaylor wrote: post #188
projectileboy wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a good friend of mine often says: We work in a field of people who envision themselves as artists, when all that is wanted are painters.

This articulates something I've been thinking about quite a lot recently; quite nicely.

Tell us more! :)

Re: Ask HN: What was your most humbling learning moment?

#277

Post by inopinatus »

* I learned Scheme after Perl and JavaScript. I strongly advise that this is the wrong order. One should learn C (or C++, if you must), then an assembler, then a Lisp, then everything else. There’s no point trying to be prescriptive about the rest, but trust me on those three; however you got started - and I got started with BBC BASIC, Acorn BCPL, 6502, and Modula-2, if you can believe it - however it goes, make sure C, assembler and Lisps are in your toolbox, you acquire super powers of mechanical sympathy for the remainder of your career. NB: for the purposes of this recommendation, JavaScript is not a Lisp (Lou Reed once called it “Lisp in drag”)

* I kicked Bono in the shin at a Pearl Jam concert a couple of decades ago and never apologised. Still feel bad about it.

Re: Ask HN: What was your most humbling learning moment?

#278

Post by khazhoux »

massysett wrote: post #174
motoxpro wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait so you are a particle physicist, a statesman, a mountain man, a mob boss, and an astronaut? Stop thinking global maxima (everyone in the world) and start thinking local maxima (you) and I promise there is someone that beats every local (you) metric you have.

Nope. There is no one that beats me at every metric I have. Does anyone know my family as well as I do? No. Does anyone know my staff as well as I do? No. Does anyone maintain my house as well as I do? No.

It is a painful admission, but in this world there are many people who are close to their families, close to their staff, keep a great house... and know technology better than you and have more impactful jobs that you and do more to improve the world and made more money than you and are loved (or at least needed) by more people than you.

There is nothing wrong with that. But it is a fallacy to expect that by some cosmic balance, it's impossible for anyone to best you along all meaningful categories.

It's probably easier to reason about this in the other direction (which is kinder on our egos): Do you believe that there is some individual on this planet who reads less than you, is lazy compared to you, treats their family and friends worse than you, contributes less to the world than you... and where at the end of the day, there's not any axis where they exceed you?

Re: Ask HN: What was your most humbling learning moment?

#279

Post by LVB »

TimTheTinker wrote: post #234
LVB wrote: post #201

While in Army basic training, my duffel got swapped with another guy's (no idea whose). Back at the barracks, I discovered that they'd snagged some spent shells from the range. Massive no-no. Young, naive me assumed that presenting these to the drill sergeants and explaining the situation would be the correct move. I was severely disciplined as a result. Others were like, "Dude... why didn't you just quietly toss tha…

Naive civilian question here -- If the drill sergeant is your boss in basic training, I don't understand why telling him info you think is important got you into trouble. After all, "talk to your boss if you have a concern" is the #1 piece of advice given to anyone who has a job. In healthy work environments, the culture is to assume the best about the intentions of others ... sounds like he wasn't doing that at all.

It wasn't a particularly healthy environment, as I recall (it was a long time ago). Rather than "tough but fair," I remember my drill cadre being volatile and sort of mean.

It was ridiculous that they punished me for coming forward. OTOH, I knew them well enough by that point, and a wiser me would have chosen to continue keeping a low profile until I could GTFO.

Re: Ask HN: What was your most humbling learning moment?

#280

Post by ChicagoDave »

In 1994 my boss asked me how long a set of changes would take in an existing billing application. I took a day to look at the code and I said 6-8 weeks.

He said we (me with his guidance) could do it in a week, maybe two. I adamantly disagreed.

We proceeded to spend about 3 days writing a detailed document on the logic required. Once he was satisfied, he asked me to take a final look at the code and revise my estimate.

I was shocked and came back and said “a few days.”

It was all done and tested in less than two weeks.

That’s when I learned how to read code and how pseudo logic can speed up software development.

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