271–280 of 441 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is the best thing I have ever read on HN
I was going to say the same thing. We really need a HN hall of fame for many of these types of comments. Pure gold. Made my Sunday.
I’m surprised and slightly disappointed that my memories don’t bring up a clear answer to this. The hardest problems I’ve faced were never exactly solved, just moved past or muddled through. Things like loss of close friends and family, acknowledging my own limitations, and accepting the inertia of flawed institutions. Any problem that eventually found a solution I remember as feeling relatively simple in retrospect.
Finding a solvable hard problem is itself very difficult. If the problem is within your confort zone, you will never feel that is an hard problem. If it is too far from your confort zone you will not be able to solve it.
My task: Take a top 500 website, all written in smalltalk (no documentation), and port it to a modern scripting language. The company has: no money, a hostile customer base, angry previous engineers, angry management, and hostile current employees. The site generated billions of webviews and was all unstructured (no database) user generated content. It was grueling. There was only one smalltalk engineer that would ta…
I somehow decided I needed to cheat to pass a certain exam because I was basically crap at memorizing stuff. So I used an analogue wireless headphone, an induction loop around my neck and a mobile phone. Since I lacked an accomplice to dictate, I read aloud the hundreds of pages and recorded myself, careful to preserve and properly serialize things like complex formulas. This was before the era of iPods and SDCard pl…
You rejected ethical behaviour 'on principle', you even seem proud of that. Have you kept doing that in life? Do you feel like an impostor, presumably with your degree that you didn't think you could acquire without cheating, or couldn't be bothered? A surprising number of the replies to your comment also seem to think cheating like that at university is perfectly fine.
I think the implication that he should feel like an impostor for cheating on two exams is a very large over-reaction on your part.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You rejected ethical behaviour 'on principle', you even seem proud of that. Have you kept doing that in life? Do you feel like an impostor, presumably with your degree that you didn't think you could acquire without cheating, or couldn't be bothered? A surprising number of the replies to your comment also seem to think cheating like that at university is perfectly fine.
My humble opinion. University is about learning (not, for example, status). Learning is something strictly personal. There is nothing fundamentally universally wrong to cheat at an exam beside the fact you may be harming yourself. Now since we need a little order for various secondary reasons, we promoted exam cheating to illegal and that's ok. We need order. But there is nothing someone should feel guilt for imho, a…
Editing a Minecraft save with sh and dd to resurrect my girlfriend's wolf.
I figured the disk is actually ok, it just went south because of a temporary glitch caused by me. So I read the source code of the softraid implementation, flipped a bit on disk in softraid metadata with dd, rebooted, and got my data back.
The contractors who built the bathroom cut corners by creating a bathroom in a single day. They didn't sufficiently mortar each tile to the wall (back butter) and wait a couple of days to set prior to grouting, as they should have. As I cleared out grout between the tile using a multi tool, vibrations agitated the tile, causing several to fall from the wall, crashing into pieces in the bathtub. Evidently, many of the tile were hardly, if at all, mortared to the substrate. Some tile weren't even fastened to the wall at all but were rather being held in place by grout.
For those unfamiliar with the business of ceramic bathroom tile, the industry does not make standard tile in perpetuity. Consequently, the odds that you will find a match for 10 year old tile are extremely low. I could not find an even remotely close style of tile to match against.
So, realizing the futility of this work, it seemed that I had no other option but to remove the three walls of tile surrounding the bath area and start new.
I did all of this from a condominium unit four flights from ground. I cut tile from the ground floor, outside, without appropriate workspace nor wet tile cutting machine but rather an angle grinder and some buckets. If you're not laughing, you really ought to try this some time.
Lessons learned:
1. Never, ever, regrout anything beyond a very small area. Avoid re-grouting entirely if possible.
2. Buy at least twenty extra tile for any new project and store them somewhere safe for the long term.
3. Professional contractors who tile for a living are worth their fee. Same applies for mortar and stone specialists.
4. DIY projects are a great distraction from cerebral day jobs but are minefields
I somehow decided I needed to cheat to pass a certain exam because I was basically crap at memorizing stuff. So I used an analogue wireless headphone, an induction loop around my neck and a mobile phone. Since I lacked an accomplice to dictate, I read aloud the hundreds of pages and recorded myself, careful to preserve and properly serialize things like complex formulas. This was before the era of iPods and SDCard pl…
One thing universities should teach is efficient problem solving. If it was more work to cheat than to memorize, I'd say you might want to re-evaluate whether "not memorizing things" is a principle you should cling so dogmatically to.