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John Ousterhout: My favorite sayings

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Re: John Ousterhout: My favorite sayings

#51

Post by dwaltrip »

naveen99 wrote: post #39

> The greatest performance improvement of all is when a system goes from not-working to working Except when speed is part of the definition of working. For example deep learning. The correct implementation was not enough until the hardware was fast enough.

Speed isn't in the definition of "working" for deep learning. Speed is an implementation detail. Perhaps a very critical one, but still an implementation detail. One can evaluate the success of a deep learning program (e.g. "is it working?") without knowing how much processing power it used.

Re: John Ousterhout: My favorite sayings

#52

Post by Normal_gaussian »

l33tbro wrote: post #16

>The three most powerful words for building credibility are "I don't know" I agree with this until you come across colleagues with the Jobsian 'reality distortion field'. Or even the social dynamics at play with the orange man that lives in the big white house. We absolutely assign credibility to people with integrity and self-awareness. But, unfortunately, we also seem to have a capacity to be charisma vultures and…

One of the ways to deal with this is to provide a positive assertion that includes the asker - "we shall need to work it out". "I don't know" is negative, reflects solely on yourself, and provides no path forwards.

Re: John Ousterhout: My favorite sayings

#53

Post by JoshCole »

mlevental wrote: post #40
andrepd wrote: post #18

>Programmers tend to worry too much and too soon about performance. Many college-level Computer Science classes focus on fancy algorithms to improve performance, but in real life performance rarely matters . Stopped reading there. A great plague of modern software development is a complete disregard for performance or resource conservation.

why do people post this kind of stuff "stopped reading right ....". congrats now we all know you're too arrogant and too impatient to finish a 1000 word essay. don't you realize that dismissing the bulk of the text based on just one comment is ignorant? do you think it matters to anyone what you even think relative to this person? do you think you have some deep insight that others don't (such that they don't already…

Worth noting that probabilistic reasoning via approximations are actually pretty cool. Its just that the same sort of thing that makes them great is also a thing which makes them terrible. The upside of not being thorough is being fast and the downside in being fast is not being through.

I find it neat that the person arguing for speed is employing heuristics which short circuit reading.

A great way to look at human biases is through the lens of the good they cause. It makes them all make sense in a way that looking at them through the lens of failure cases doesn't. The world is awe inspiring in its complexity and coping with that efficiently and in real time requires trade offs. Catch the same person who appears delusional in one real-time context at a time wherein they can think for longer and their thinking can become much more logical and mathematical.

Re: John Ousterhout: My favorite sayings

#54

Post by ssss11 »

KKKKkkkk1 wrote: post #42
MFogleman wrote: post #3

The three most powerful words for building credibility are "I don't know" I had a supervisor once who always had an answer to your question. He was always 100% sure he was right. He was not always right. Consequently, going to him for help would sometimes result in the problem becoming worse. The best supervisor I ever had was the one who routinely told me "I don't know, let me call {PersonInOtherDepartment}" or "See…

In my experience, saying "I don't know" outside of an academic environment leads to two consequences: 1) People will stop listening to you in preference to loud people who "know"; 2) Loud people who know will use your admission against you. Sadly, the good habits that you learn in academia will come back to haunt you when you move into industry.

In the corporate world: completely agree.

Re: John Ousterhout: My favorite sayings

#55

Post by andrepd »

mlevental wrote: post #40
andrepd wrote: post #18

>Programmers tend to worry too much and too soon about performance. Many college-level Computer Science classes focus on fancy algorithms to improve performance, but in real life performance rarely matters . Stopped reading there. A great plague of modern software development is a complete disregard for performance or resource conservation.

why do people post this kind of stuff "stopped reading right ....". congrats now we all know you're too arrogant and too impatient to finish a 1000 word essay. don't you realize that dismissing the bulk of the text based on just one comment is ignorant? do you think it matters to anyone what you even think relative to this person? do you think you have some deep insight that others don't (such that they don't already…

It was hyperbole. I did actually read the rest of the points, I just didn't pay any more attention to that one.

I don't feel any kind of superiority, I was just voicing my opinion. Maybe you're projecting?

Re: John Ousterhout: My favorite sayings

#56

Post by type0 »

dionidium wrote: post #49
schizoidboy wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I doubt there are statistics on such things, so we'll have to deal in anecdotes, and I've had the total opposite experience (I make this comment so that any young people or academics aren't prematurely jaded). When a lot is at stake (e.g. high revenue, medicine, infrastructure, etc.), especially when a team has been burned by loud people, a person who says, "I don't know, but let's figure it out" (that's my job) is p…

This is also my experience. I've heard the claims in this thread (i.e. that people who pretend to know things get ahead, while those who admit that they don't know stuff are never trusted) my entire life, but I've always thought, "who are these people talking about?" Whenever I've worked with a blowhard who couldn't admit when they didn't know something literally everybody smart thought of them as a blowhard who coul…

> literally everybody smart ...

Too bad this excludes so many managers, but really this is so much a company culture issue than anything. So to cite from the article: "very few companies are capable of making significant changes in their culture or business model, so it is good for companies eventually to go out of business, thereby opening space for better companies in the future."

Re: John Ousterhout: My favorite sayings

#57

Post by weinzierl »

My favorite saying form John Ousterhout:

> What's Wrong With Threads?

> Too hard for most programmers to use.

> Even for experts, development is painful.

I read the slides for his presentation "Why Threads Are A Bad Idea (for most purposes)" [1] in the late 90s and it saved me from a lot of confusion in the following decades. This was especially helpful in a time when Java peaked in popularity and people were like: "Hey, threads are cheap and easy now, what's the problem when our solution uses thousands of them?".

[1] https://web.stanford.edu/~ouster/cgi-bin/papers/threads.pdf

Re: John Ousterhout: My favorite sayings

#58

Post by type0 »

The take home message here should be:

> There are 2 kinds of software in the world: software that starts out crappy and eventually becomes great, and software that starts out crappy and stays that way.

Re: John Ousterhout: My favorite sayings

#59

Post by msangi »

KKKKkkkk1 wrote: post #42
MFogleman wrote: post #3

The three most powerful words for building credibility are "I don't know" I had a supervisor once who always had an answer to your question. He was always 100% sure he was right. He was not always right. Consequently, going to him for help would sometimes result in the problem becoming worse. The best supervisor I ever had was the one who routinely told me "I don't know, let me call {PersonInOtherDepartment}" or "See…

In my experience, saying "I don't know" outside of an academic environment leads to two consequences: 1) People will stop listening to you in preference to loud people who "know"; 2) Loud people who know will use your admission against you. Sadly, the good habits that you learn in academia will come back to haunt you when you move into industry.

The key is not saying "I don't know" and end the conversation. You should give advices on where to find the information needed and who is in a best position to answer.

I've done it plenty of times and my colleagues keep coming back to me when they need help.

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