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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?

#561

Post by mr-wendel »

vasco wrote: post #422
eru wrote: post #404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Our HN user, mr-wendel, worked at the company, but I'm not sure they said what their job was. It might have been sysadmin, but since mr-wendel talks about snitching on a senior sysadmin directly to the CEO, it's save to say that the sysadmin did not report to mr-wendel; and I presume that mr-wendel was a lot lower an the pecking order. I don't think the senior sysadmin was paid to hide browsing from the oversight?

I'm not defending running rogue workloads on your employers infrastructure, that's obviously wrong. I'm just saying from the description, and the role of who did it, it probably wasn't super problematic in terms of security.

I think this thread highlights nicely that context is everything.

In this case, I think vasco's take is correct: the sysadmin was indeed trustworthy enough to exercise this discretion in response to overzealous employee productivity rules without at all undermining his primary responsibilities.

The proxy was definitely in a place to essentially trivialize it's impact. I'm pretty sure thats why it was placed where it was, as opposed to make it harder to find. If that was the chief concern, disabling logging would have obviously been the first thing to happen.

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

#562

Post by deaddodo »

nedt wrote: post #467
deaddodo wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No offense, but HN and Reddit are both American created, operated, and primarily trafficked sites. It's not unusual to assume an American audience. If OP came out assuming a Nairobi design that wasn't used anywhere else, or if they went to the heise.de forums and posted the above; now that would be odd/call-out worthy.

It looks like more than half the traffic is not coming from the US. So even with most traffic coming from the US many here aren't. Good news is that Ikea had a system like that. So there will be many households in Europe that's also fighting with blinds.

Sure, my only point is that telling Americans to back off of/check themselves in spaces that are their only ones just because English happens to be the most spoken language worldwide (especially in the tech-savvy communities) is always weird. Especially when ~45% of the traffic is American.

If an American that spoke German did the same in a German-majority space they would be met with pretty massive derision.

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

#563

Post by pragma_x »

bitwize wrote: post #348
jonplackett wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You must have absolutely nailed the rest of the interview!

It was the early nineties. If you've touched a computer, companies would assume that any skill gap you had you could straightforwardly bridge yourself, on the job. It wasn't like today where you have to be a perfect cinnamon roll of a candidate who ticks all of HR's required-skill checkboxes before you can move on to the grueling 5-6 rounds of interviews.

This is not an exaggeration. Those boom times, much like the discovery of gold on the Klondike, was the wild-west of information technology. If you had a pulse, and knew which part was the "mouse", you were employable. Granted, you might be fixing dial-up modems or troubleshooting email settings all day, but work was plentiful. And yes, your job responsibilities and "training" were one and the same.

And dear reader, if this has you thinking that the early internet was a planet-wide bird's nest of bailing wire and duct-tape slapped together by amateurs, you're paying attention. Huge parts of it were just that. We're all better at it now, but "better" is a relative term and not evenly distributed.

"Entry level" doesn't even mean the same thing nowadays and it's a crying shame.

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

#564

Post by solardev »

I was at the climbing gym this one time, working on a route. There were two copies of it side-by-side, as though for a race – ooh, fun! By this point I'd been climbing occasionally for about a decade and considered myself a beginner plus. I was never very good, being both overweight and lacking strength, but I did spend dozens of hours practicing.

My first time trying this route, I got halfway up but missed a jump. After a few more tries, I got past that part but got stuck further up, not having enough skill and strength to finish. Each attempt took me probably 5-7 minutes, and altogether I was on that route for about half an hour.

Then this thirteen year-old girl walked up and tied in next to me. She surveyed the route and checked her harness. Then, in one practiced motion, she leapt off the ground, reached for a hold above her head with one hand, and slapped the route timer start button with the other. I didn't even know there was a timer, so I was watching it curiously. It stopped at 8 second something. I was confused. I looked up, but she was already being lowered. I wondered to myself, wait, did she get pulled up by the auto-belay...? How does that work...?

Then she did it again. This time I watched. She flew up the course, jumping from hold to hold faster than I could even think, and beat her previous time by a few tenths of a second. It was like this video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ktxxI_IPXjA) (that's not her, but similar route... maybe even the same route? not sure if it's a standard).

Despite a decade of climbing (mix of gym and outdoors, usually in small towns), it was my first time seeing a speed climber. I didn't even know that was a thing. Moreover, I didn't know the human body could even move that fast. Granted, I was never very fit, but I don't think I realized until that moment just how much fitter another person could actually be. In less than 10 seconds she easily finished what I couldn't do even in 400+ seconds – even though I'd been climbing longer than she'd been alive, lol.

It was humbling, astonishing, inspiring, and comedic to me all at once. It was very much one of those "wtf have I been doing with my whole life" moments. I'd always been the kind of person who was OK at a lot of things, never very good at any one thing, and to bear witness to such raw ability was... beautiful, if a bit discouraging, lol. I hope that by the time I die, I can become that good at SOMETHING in my life.

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

#565

Post by Fripplebubby »

jeremiahbuckley wrote: post #48
leipert wrote: post #23

Ah, some of the things in this thread remind me of https://xkcd.com/1053/

I quote this all the time to people. There’s too much, we’re spread too thin. Ignorance shouldn’t be considered a big deal or a huge embarrassment. Not being ready to learn is a problem, but ignorance is sort of the default state now.

Not to be a wet blanket, but yes ignorance should be tolerated and warmly received about things which do not matter much, but sometimes a person's ignorance about certain things can tell you unfortunate truths about the way they view the world and what they consider worth looking into or not.

For example, think of someone who is ignorant of the cultural practices of a certain minority of people despite seeing members of this group every day in their neighborhood, this tells me something not so positive about this person and how they view the world and other people. However it is never too late to change, either.

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

#566

Post by bombcar »

Loughla wrote: post #458
qup wrote: post #39

I often learn how to use something well that I've been using my whole life. A ratchet strap was a good example--you can use it without understanding how to use it well. One video (essential craftsman) fixed that for me. I think the most humbling for me is seeing a real pro use something you use a lot, like a kitchen knife.

How were you using ratchet straps wrong?

https://www.facebook.com/Essentialcraftsman/videos/ratchet-s... watch and learn!

"Big wrap" is the biggest mistake I've done (and seen).

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

#567

Post by Fripplebubby »

Fripplebubby wrote: post #565
jeremiahbuckley wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I quote this all the time to people. There’s too much, we’re spread too thin. Ignorance shouldn’t be considered a big deal or a huge embarrassment. Not being ready to learn is a problem, but ignorance is sort of the default state now.

Not to be a wet blanket, but yes ignorance should be tolerated and warmly received about things which do not matter much, but sometimes a person's ignorance about certain things can tell you unfortunate truths about the way they view the world and what they consider worth looking into or not. For example, think of someone who is ignorant of the cultural practices of a certain minority of people despite seeing members…

The same can be said for class as well, many people I have met who have grown up wealthy and comfortable and just don't think much about the people who serve their food, do work for them, make the things they buy, and have no idea who they are and what their lives are like and don't wonder about it. Part of that is how society is structured to hide these people from them, that's part of what they're paying for.

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

#568

Post by mr-wendel »

michaelt wrote: post #483
kaba0 wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would it be good to report it? Depending on what “infrastructure” stands for here, unless it is something absolutely unwise security-wise, why?

When I was young, I thought that being a man of my word meant that, as I'd given my employer my word that I would follow their security policy, I should follow it to the letter - for example, never holding the door open, even for a colleague I'd worked alongside for a long time. And I thought that petty rulebreaking was a corrosive force, something that would snowball into bigger problems down the road. As a man of h…

> I thought that being a man of my word meant that, as I'd given my employer my word that I would follow their security policy, I should follow it to the letter

This basically sums up my "cover story" nicely so I didn't have to admit to myself that it was more about scoring points for my own position.

Dressing up vanity as integrity is a dangerous thing.

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

#569

Post by matwood »

Honestly, it happens regularly in jiu-jitsu (and is one of the reasons I love the sport). I've been training for a number of years, and while I lose to higher belts I typically know what happened. Occasionally I get to roll with people who are world class level (another cool thing about the sport), and they make me feel like it's day 1 all over again. Then they'll give me a few pointers that look completely innocuous and it'll change my entire game.

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

#570

Post by AndrewKemendo »

fsckboy wrote: post #492
aguacaterojo wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i think that the story is loaded with about 80% superfluous context and 20% story. op worked at us airforce base managing access control to global intel systems. he delegated authorisation check to jr. jr told op they checked out, however, jr had not adhered to latest security protocol that required cross checking request against request database, relying instead only on physical credentials. op granted access howeve…

and he doesn't sound humbled

Nothing more humbling than 1000 people being shown your error

But hey, if that didn’t come through, at least it was an exposition problem ;)

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