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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?

#641

Post by 93po »

Yodel0914 wrote: post #358

A while back I came across this self-directed question: "How have I been complicit in creating the conditions I say I don’t want?" (from Jerry Colonna, according to The Internet). For me, it has been a sporadic but powerful concept that often sits me on my ass, especially when I find myself feeling ungrateful or put upon. I was already very familiar with Stoicism which has similar lessons. So not only did I discover…

one of my favorite pieces of advice i read a couple months ago and have been trying really hard to implement: don't engage in online discussions that you don't want to see, even if it's to disprove someone else's bad takes. one's engagement with these conversations is why they perpetuate.

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

#642

Post by qup »

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?

Well, I didn't know the reason I was opening the ratchet handle--the opposing end has a cam on it, so it moves a metal bit out of the way of the ratcheting teeth. I would pull that thing out of the way with a finger on my second hand (when under load it can be very hard to get loose).

I also didn't know about the harmonics & putting a twist in the line. I also had a lot of problem with my lines working loose, which I don't have anymore, but I'm not sure I learned the fix in the video.

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

#643

Post by jodrellblank »

massysett wrote: post #111
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…

> 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…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonny_Kim - "an American U.S. Navy lieutenant commander, former SEAL, Navy flight surgeon, naval aviator, physician, and NASA astronaut. .. Kim received a Bachelor of Arts, summa cum laude, in mathematics from the University of San Diego in 2012, and a Doctor of Medicine from Harvard Medical School in 2016. Kim was a Pat Tillman Foundation "Tillman Scholar" selectee. In 2017, Kim completed his medical internship in emergency medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital and Brigham and Women's Hospital.[6] ... was assigned to SEAL Team 3 with the rating Special Warfare Operator. He deployed twice to the Middle East and participated in over 100 combat missions as a combat medic, sniper, navigator, and point man. As of January 2020, Kim was married[7] with three children.[8]"

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

#644

Post by borski »

riehwvfbk wrote: post #635
borski wrote: post #633

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I quell that anxiety by reminding myself of all the superpowers it gives me. If you haven’t read “ADHD is Awesome,” I recommend it.

I don't know, this line of thinking seems similar to "I am a midget - but look, I never have a problem with legroom on airplanes!" The tiny upside is simply incommesurate with the massive downsides.

The upside is not tiny. There are many, many things I am far better at than most of my peers.

I highly recommend reading “ADHD is Awesome” as well as Mark Suster’s blog posts on ADHD.

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

#645

Post by mierz00 »

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…

Thanks for sharing, I had difficulty empathising with the OP but this puts it in perspective.

I’m curious, did these ideas come from your upbringing?

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

#646

Post by bane »

ahfeah7373 wrote: post #610
bane wrote: post #590

I've had a few humble pie experiences: When I was young I set myself on a path to become a professional string musician. I practiced relentlessly and sat section lead and first chair in about 4 different school and local orchestras. I was relatively well known as the studious musician kid and there were some hopes that I was "going to go all the way". Then I had a rough tryout for a regional orchestra, made it, but s…

How did you handle accepting your dreams would never happen?

I was sad and directionless (sometimes angry) for a few years.

Then one day something sort of "clicked" and a new direction I wanted to go sort of crystalized, I pursued it and never looked back.

It helps that I can still pursue music as a hobby and don't feel the relentless pressure to be good -- so these days I actually get to enjoy many aspects of my dream when I feel like it and it stays fun.

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

#647

Post by throwaway2037 »

rcbdev wrote: post #363
icelancer wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No one wants to be a "programmer." They'd rather be called "engineers." With none of the licensure, mandatory education, and so forth. But the world needs programmers and technicians for most of the work we have to do. I do comparably little "engineering" and the little I have done that qualifies for such a statement I recall. Majority of the work is programming and technician work. Nothing wrong with that.

Maybe not in the U.S. but in Europe, Software Engineering is often a field of engineering where one can get licensed. i.e. in Austria many IT techs and devs are called (at the doctor's office or in formal settings) "Mr. Engineer" ("Herr Ingenieur") if they fulfill some formal criteria and get licensed. A further qualification is becoming a federally certified civil technician for IT (Ziviltechniker or Ingenieurskonsu…

    > they fulfill some formal criteria and get licensed
Can you tell us about the process to get licensed? Do you think it adds value for software developers?

And just to troll a little bit: Do they make you do any hard problems from HackerRank or LeetCode?

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

#648

Post by throwaway2037 »

VBprogrammer wrote: post #411
lyu07282 wrote: post #389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yet almost every major piece of software or idea started in California and almost nothing noteworthy in the space started in Austria. I think that tells us something about the real value of a piece of paper granting you the right to call yourself an "engineer".

I'm sure there are many things which make this such an unfair comparison that it's not worth making. If there was a firehose of money spraying all over Austria as a result of being the worlds reserve currency I'm sure the shoe would be on the other foot.

Plus primary spoken language (Austrian-style German) and size of domestic market explains a lot.

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

#649

Post by throwaway2037 »

Karrot_Kream wrote: post #334
ywain wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not the person you're replying to, but here's my take: even though the two look conceptually similar, Unix programs are just a lot simpler. All programs run on the same machine, they read their input, execute, produce output which is piped to the next program, and terminate. Want to change something? Change one of the programs (or your command line), run the command again, that's it. Microservices are a lot more…

We only think of Unix programs as simple because we have many more abstractions nowadays. But you should compare a Unix program with DOS programs (probably CP/M also but I never wrote those myself) at the time. Poking directly at the hardware, using segmented memory, dealing with interrupts. The idea that a program should be well behaved, should accept things an inputs, should push outputs, and should have a virtual…

    > should have a virtual address space
I'm pretty sure that most of the GNU POSIX command line tools were written before virtual address space (VAS) was common. And, as I understand, VAS is hidden from the programmer behind magical malloc().

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

#650

Post by throwaway2037 »

immibis wrote: post #425
sevnin wrote: post #380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a great question. Some might say it's because of the network - that makes microservices messy and so on. But I dont think so, from what I remember plan9 (the os, successor of unix), Rob Pike wanted to make it so that there is no difference between an object being on the network or outside the network. In unix philosophy, things have the same interface, it's easy to communicate. For microservices it would be RE…

Everyone wants to make network objects the same as local objects. Nobody's ever succeeded.

This is the first time that I heard about it. Can you tell me about other examples?
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