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Ask HN: Advice to your younger self

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Re: Ask HN: Advice to your younger self

#71

Post by strictnein »

simonbarker87 wrote: post #39
strictnein wrote: post #30

You aren't busy. You just feel busy. Find time to do interesting things, because once you have kids you'll find out what being busy actually means.

Parents don’t own being busy or stretched for time. Regardless of what commitments you have you can be busy or not and you are in control of that - yes even parents are in control of how busy they are.

> Parents don’t own being busy or stretched for time.

Didn't say that. I was saying something to my past self who thought I was busy at the time which was the point of all this.

And, no, you're not in full control of how busy you are when you're a parent. You have kids? Because no parent I know would ever say that.

Re: Ask HN: Advice to your younger self

#72

Post by toomuchtodo »

jerf wrote: post #63
simonbarker87 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Parents don’t own being busy or stretched for time. Regardless of what commitments you have you can be busy or not and you are in control of that - yes even parents are in control of how busy they are.

There is a qualitative change in when you are busy for the vast majority, though. Most people don't have a job where at any minute you have to drop everything and perform some task. This being HN, a very above-average number of the people who do have a job of that nature are around here, of course, but I'd expect it's still a majority of people of baby-having age around here who are not routinely getting paged at 2am…

As someone who was an infrastructure engineer/sysadmin/it manager for over 16 years (ie various roles that required an on call component), my move to security at the same time as having kids couldn’t have come at a better time.

Being on call 24/7 is not conducive to being available for parenting responsibilities of young children.

Re: Ask HN: Advice to your younger self

#74

Post by acconrad »

Work harder. I relied too much on pedigree and not enough on hard work. Also take an algorithms and compilers class. I'd be a much better developer sooner if I just grinded on some hard classes, and I probably would have landed that job at Facebook back in 2008.

Re: Ask HN: Advice to your younger self

#75

Post by Balgair »

A single phrase?:

Health above all things.

How about 11 good ideas?:

1. Dance More

2. Women are attracted to confidence, nothing else (I'm heterosexual, hence women. Probably works for any romantic partner to be)

3. Stay with your dog when they put her down, she deserves that at least that

4. Wear good clothes that fit well

5. Life is harder if you are dumb

6. So get smart, define 'smart' as you go

7. Take care of your health

8. Take care of your friends and family

9. The world is only getting crazier, so learn to surf

10. Really, I'm serious, dance more

11. Go Giants!

I made a whole book with 1001 other little pithy bits as a gift for a friend's newborn. Let me know if you want a copy and I can send it to you.

Re: Ask HN: Advice to your younger self

#77

Post by Shikadi »

heavenlyblue wrote: post #49
Shikadi wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Second this, learning multiple languages is generally seen as a good thing, opening your mind to different ways of solving problems, no?

Any language in the area of discourse is a Turing-complete language. Therefore you can do anything you'd like to in any language. Besides, I would be highly critical of anyone who claims to know a variety of languages since it probably means they are only familiar with a strict subset of their standard libraries and quirks. Or that knowledge is incredibly outdated. Learning the syntax is one thing, the more time-cons…

>Any language in the area of discourse is a Turing-complete language. Therefore you can do anything you'd like to in any language.

Well with that argument, learning brainf*ck in depth should give you all the programming experience you need to solve problems efficiently :P

Learning even the basics of a functional programming language for example (Haskell in my case) lead me to understand why things are the way they are in a few other languages. Sure you can write some solution in a few nested for loops, but why not use a list comprehension if it's more clear and less error prone for the situation? Specializing in one or two languages isn't a bad thing, but I would argue that learning even just the basics of other languages is beneficial. Understanding what tools are out there and what they're best suited to is a good thing if you ask me.

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