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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?

#521

Post by stavros »

medymed wrote: post #167
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…

I wonder if super-people like this balance their various activities so that doing each charges them up for some of the others, and then they can hit a resonance like state of being in-the-zone excelling at each one in turn. And not letting small interruptions derail the system. It would be the opposite of being stuck in a soul-sucking rut between unsatisfying work and unsatisfying non-work life.

They probably just like doing them.

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

#522

Post by stavros »

nicbou wrote: post #351
netsharc wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But why does it have to be a competition, of thinking "I have to be the best at X, if someone else is better, I feel unworthy.". I ask rhetorically, that sentence probably describes me more than my impression of you from 3 paragraphs.

I identify by the things I love and excel at. If being an artist is a big chunk of who you are, it can hurt your ego to meet q much better artist who is also good at many other things. Imagine playing the bongos, and you meet some guy who plays it really well… and it’s Richard Feynman.

The reason why I can't relate to this much is that I play the bongos not to be the best bongo player, but because I like playing the bongos. I know that, for some people, the motivator is "being admired at X", but that's not what drives me, I usually just like doing X. Sometimes, I get good at it. Other times (like with tennis), I keep sucking, but I still like the process.

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

#523

Post by tracker1 »

camgunz wrote: post #378
fifilura wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(Honest question) What is the difference between this microservice architecture that gets a lot of hate here?

Microservices require Kafka (or a Kafka equivalent)

You can do something like 0mq, but still need something to coordinate configurations on where service-x is, like etcd.

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

#524

Post by cjfd »

fifilura wrote: post #285
hiAndrewQuinn wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's cliche, but I really do feel reading the Art of Unix Programming gave me a very good sense early on for how to walk this line carefully. Unix programs are high quality - but they're also, ideally, small , and written with an eye to compositionality with the rest of the ecosystem. The best architecture is in the middle, and often the best first draft is a simple series of pipes. https://www.catb.org/~esr/writings…

(Honest question) What is the difference between this microservice architecture that gets a lot of hate here?

If somebody created a complex system of one hundred small unix utilities that all talk to each other over pipes I am sure it would get abd deserve a lot of hate. Unix utilities are nice to do very small, simple things, but there is a limit.

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

#525

Post by ralusek »

First encounter with Monty Hall problem. My roommate in college told me about it, and I was absolutely unable to see how it could be anything other than a 50/50 chance for the remaining two doors.

It took me actually drawing out a grid of the possible scenarios to see and accept that he was correct.

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

#526

Post by EricMausler »

nicbou wrote: post #351
netsharc wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But why does it have to be a competition, of thinking "I have to be the best at X, if someone else is better, I feel unworthy.". I ask rhetorically, that sentence probably describes me more than my impression of you from 3 paragraphs.

I identify by the things I love and excel at. If being an artist is a big chunk of who you are, it can hurt your ego to meet q much better artist who is also good at many other things. Imagine playing the bongos, and you meet some guy who plays it really well… and it’s Richard Feynman.

I cant help but chime in here because I used to feel this way and all the typical advice never felt right (ie that you shouldn't care how good you are at things)

Very quickly I will list the 3 main points that have helped me the most

1) the things you care to try to excel at is a statement about things worth excelling at and actual skill is often a minor detail. It's okay to identify with where the effort goes and how much you give rather than the result of it. In this way it is like voting, and there is no best person at voting. You identify with the tribe, not your ability

2) when being competitive does actually matter, the best in the world cannot be everywhere at once, so there is actually a lot of meaning behind being the best locally at something. Or even just not the worst locally. Identity is irrelevant on this one, but it does require you care and are self aware about how good you actually are at things.

3) how you relate to others is also a big part of identity. being in the middle of the pack on most things makes you much more relatable than being best. For some person who is better than you at everything, are you able to deeply connect with them or do you get distracted by comparison thoughts, insecurity, or ideas to use them for something self-serving? If not you, still how often in their life do you think that happens for them with others?

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

#527

Post by tracker1 »

tictacttoe wrote: post #470
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.…

Having heard a variation of this comment many times, I keep waiting for an “aha” moment, where I see the light and abandon my obsession with minimalism and clean code. But at least in science roles it hasn’t happened yet. Rather, I keep seeing instances of bogus scientific conclusions which waste money for years before they are corrected. Being systematic, reproducible, and thorough is difficult, but it’s the only wa…

Literally the only thing I tend to worry about up front is deployment automation. I've worked in so many environments that don't have it, or have some byzantine manual deployment strategy that just gets irksome and difficult. I'm a big fan of containers, even for single-system deployments. If only because it always bites you when you are under the greatest time pressure otherwise.

Beyond that, my focus is on a solution to the problem/need at hand, and less about optimizations. You can avoid silly stuff, and keep things very simple from the start. Make stuff that's easy to replace, and you often won't ever need to do so.

Most software isn't about science, and isn't engineering... it's about solving real world problems, or creating digital/virtual solutions to what would otherwise be manual and labor-costly processes. You can shape a classic rdbms into many uses, it's less than ideal, but easy enough to understand. Very few jobs are concentrated on maximizing performance, or minimizing memory or compute overhead. Most development is line of business dev that gets deployed to massively overpowered machines or VMs.

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

#529

Post by [deleted] »

oblib wrote: post #81

I was in my early 20s talking with a friend who was at least twice my age. I was bitching about a guy who'd look at the work I was doing who really didn't know squat about it and start telling me how I should be doing it. After listening to me for a bit he quietly said "Well, you can learn something from everyone if you focus on that." I spent a couple days pondering that. At first I tried dismissing it because he wa…

[deleted]

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

#530

Post by tracker1 »

ozr wrote: post #260
tempie2024 wrote: post #216

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.

You never know... I've seen an instance where it turns out an employee was watching pr0n at work and downloading the materials to their shared profile directory. Discovered when the IT Admin was requesting a new NAS server because the current shares were full.

edit: to be clear, it wasn't the admin downloading the content.

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