Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: What was your most humbling learning moment?

news.ycombinator.com

311–320 of 704 posts

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

#311

Oh, the day I lost 15% of my net worth because of a single bet/investment. This was after a period of months during which I had already lost perhaps 30% of my TNW (Total Net Worth). It hurted so much. Soo much. I felt dumb. Unlucky. That the world was unjust. I proceeded to analyze why I did that investment, and if it was a bad or good idea. It was indeed - I didn't know enough about that investment, and I realized I…

"have a strategy that does not depend on your opinions." -nntaleb

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

#312
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.…

I had a colleague who was old school and loved optimising, everything he reviewed come back with tiny changes that would save fractions of a ms. His nemesis was a guy who was arguably the best coder I have ever worked with. Things come to a head in one meeting and old school said if we did things his way our code would run quicker and the response was legendary 'If we coded like you it'd run quicker because most of the functionality would be still in the backlog.' I still think about that when it comes to optimisation.

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

#313
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…

Being great only matters if you need external validation. I want a life I appreciate. If there’s anything to win it’s the game of having a good time. All of the suffering people impose on themselves, on their children, on their society, to be great and envied is wasted. Be successful as a means to be happy and have excess to share with others.

This idea doesn’t come early, you have to die few times to get it. I guess that’s how human works, hardwired.

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

#314
post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is a hard one. Best to report it I think.. but it is not clear cut in general. There would be times when going against your employer by blowing the whistle or covering up is the more moral thing to do. Deciding where that line is not simple and there is no guide.

It's a guy browsing the internet a bit. This is not some deep philosophical question. You're just advocating being the type of person we'd all hate to work with.

“It’s a guy browsing the internet a bit” can be game over from a security perspective. Some machines should never execute code from public web pages, full stop.

So it is a philosophical question of why the restrictions were in place in this scenario. If it was “employee productivity”, then sure, who cares. If it was an IRS computer with thousands of people’s tax returns on disk and access to millions more, then reporting was the right move.

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

#315
post #223
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…

> Oh well -- so much for competition! Time to enjoy ;)

Some people reacts like this. And some react by doubling down and doing whatever it takes (even cheating, lying and harming competitors) to win. When I played soccer in a local league I meet a worrying amount of people that thought that dangerously kicking a better oponent, for example tackling to the knee, was perfectly reasonable. Elbowing someone in the face was OK it the referee didn't get you. My coach once warned me that I didn't have a proper rate of yellow cards for my playing position, so I should play harder for the sake of it. I fed up and left the sport at 23-25 y.o.

A lot of people is unable of competing with themselves ("I want to do X better than myself from the past year, so I need to practice"), and as long as they don't know about someone who is better they don't care to get better at something.

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

#316

I consider myself fairly literate and a decent communicator. Until recently I pronounced ‘segue’ how it is spelled. No one ever corrected me. I shudder to think about the meetings where I pronounced it incorrectly.

This happens to people who read more than they talk. I never hold it against them.

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

#317

I was in my 20s before I realized even numbered houses are always on one side of the street and odd numbers on the other. Literally no excuse for not figuring that out.

As usual, there are exceptions as well. For example some streets in Berlin use a "horseshoe" numbering system. I tend to look for the house numbers of opposing houses when I enter a street I don't know to check if it is horseshoe or even-odd numbering.

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

#318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You'd think that he beat me at one thing by neglecting another, but nope, the guy was excelling in every category. This is literally impossible. A person cannot be Einstein and Picasso at the same time. A person cannot be Steve Jobs and Pope Francis at the same time. We all have limited time in life, and it is only possible to excel in one thing by focusing on it and, as a result, not focusing on something else. Th…

I’ve definitely met people whose stats are juiced. Probably not as good at scrolling tiktok as me tho

Then you see their feed one time and cry cause there’s no way to copy it to your account.

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

#319
At provincial grade school, I was top of most classes with very little effort. It made me lazy. But in higher education I finally met people who were significantly more capable than me (at least in my chosen specialism). I had to raise my game, and it still wasn’t enough to be top again. In postgraduate study, I met one person who I swear had superhuman powers. I check in on him occasionally to see what he’s become president of.

Throughout my working career I’ve spotted this pattern time and time again: the jobs where everybody thinks you’re great are the ones where you’re learning the least.

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

#320
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.…

I can relate. I am now on a small team of half a dozen (2 front, two back, 2 devops). We've been smashing it for the last year, replaced a hodgepodge of systems with a configurable framework and a modular integration layer with third-party systems. As a reward our work the management are bringing in a consultancy we are supposed to train to replace us. That will be a very expensive and inefficient exercise. How do I know? Our small team was created to deliver what the previous consultancy could not do in 5+ years. That experience taught me once again that management in large organisations have no idea what they want to build, how to build it, how to maintain it, and that's where large consultancies come in, milk the client for all they can and leave a massive mess behind them.
Post reply on HN