Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Hand Licking Incident

raisingfutureadults.blogspot.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

231–240 of 358 posts

Re: The Hand Licking Incident

#231

Post by [deleted] »

crispyambulance wrote: post #187
Carpetsmoker wrote: post #179

So the teacher, grandparent, and father never bothered asking why he's licking his hands, and his mother only after a lot of drama, including spanking(!!) I get that being a parent is hard and try to hold off my judgements on stuff like this over the internet, but ... I am not wildly impressed by this teacher or their parenting. I'm glad that at least the mother came to her senses later on and decided to treat her ch…

I am skeptical that the child did it strictly because his hands were dry. It sounds more like an infantile behavior, like thumb-sucking, that persists in some children well into school age much to the disappointment of their parents. That said, the correct way to handle thumb-sucking is not to make it into a daily battle, just like the author discovered. It goes away by itself with little-to-no intervention required.

[deleted]

Re: The Hand Licking Incident

#232

Post by Varnaan »

So a bad mother that takes 2 years to notice her son's hands get dry in very cold weather turns into an abusive parent because she feels pressured by other people.

She should have aborted, her son will only suffer from having a psychotic mother.

Re: The Hand Licking Incident

#233

Post by couchand »

javajosh wrote: post #210
dri_ft wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The trouble comes when the others working on your code are crazy enough that that strange code often is useless, so you have to spend the time trying to work out whether it's tear-out-worthy.

A sign of maturity is to a) recognize when code is crazy, and b) document why it is so in a comment.

Here let me fix that for you: "document why it is so in an executable test".

Re: The Hand Licking Incident

#234

Post by benj111 »

mcv wrote: post #221
benj111 wrote: post #163

Slightly off topic but would throwing an alcoholic drink on a fire make it worse? 90% of drinks aren't going to be strong enough anyway, but what about neat spirit ( Obviously don't try on electrical fires. Edit: Clarity

Strong liquor is used to flambe food, so strong drink is definitely flammable in some circumstances. Beer and wine probably aren't.

You need to heat it first though, it isn't exactly easy to ignite, and it doesn't set fire to the food either.

Edit: Spelling

Re: The Hand Licking Incident

#235

Post by pdpi »

cryptonector wrote: post #47

It's so easy for parents (and teachers) to misdiagnose strange child behaviors. TFA is a wonderful example. Parents need to watch for things like blood sugar problems, autism (e.g., failure to make eye contact), skin problems, mild food allergies (why does the kid not like _fill in the blank_, maybe it's because it tastes "spicy" to them), and much else. Young children will not figure these things out by themselves.…

> Parents need to watch for things like blood sugar problems, autism (e.g., failure to make eye contact), skin problems, mild food allergies (why does the kid not like _fill in the blank_, maybe it's because it tastes "spicy" to them), and much else.

But this attitude is precisely the issue! Most of those problems are mild and fairly benign, and not all that common. We've gotten ourselves into this terrible mindset that allowing children to experience any little discomfort is a sign of bad parenting, while ignoring the damage our overbearing vigilance is causing — both physical, as with auto-immune diseases that seem to be linked to excessive hygiene, and psychological (in all sort of fun and destructive ways).

Re: The Hand Licking Incident

#236

Post by gambiting »

tempestn wrote: post #188
adrianN wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't trust a four year old to understand what death means.

My kids are six and four, and explaining to them that something could seriously injure or kill them is definitely enough to prevent them from ever doing it. I can't imagine spanking them to try to make a point, but if anything I expect that would influence them to trust my warnings of potential injury less.

As a complete anecdote - I remember when my parents told me when I was very little that eating rotten/mouldy food could get you seriously ill, I think I even asked if you could die from it - to which they said that yes, you could.

And after that, I had a complete phobia of everything that seemed even slightly off. I became incredibly picky, because that one spot on the slice of cheese could be mould or because the ham smelled not how my 8 year old brain thought it should smell like.

No spanking involved, but the psychological damage was much greater I think.

Re: The Hand Licking Incident

#237

Post by asdkhadsj »

syllogism wrote: post #199
RobertoG wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>"Little kid logic is so foreign to me now it makes me a little sad." Well, you have to admit that your nephew logic was flawless. As him, you wouldn't go into your room if you though there is a one meter frog waiting for you. His priors were weird, but that's to be expected with little experience of the world.

Also these adults ignoring the issue and sending him to the room anyway? Plainly in league with frog and not to be trusted.

Make them believe you accept what they say. After all, how can you trust someone who makes deals with frogs - they can only be infinitely more dangerous, as it is hard to grasp their dire frog-centric motivations.

Re: The Hand Licking Incident

#238

Post by falcor84 »

A great story which really resonated with me from the operations / reliability engineering perspective. It is very common for junior engineers to jump into an action in case of a big outage before really trying to understand the problem.

One example I've seen multiple times was to deal with a repeatedly crashing process by restarting yet another process. In some cases, this may help, but in others it can make the situation much much worse. Instead, the advice I took to heart is to delay action until you have a mental model of the problem, and how the planned action would resolve it (and if possible, sense check it with another engineer).

In the best case scenario, you would have a trusted (well-tested) mitigation procedure that would provide you with enough time to recreate the issue and test the proposed solution in a staging environment.

Re: The Hand Licking Incident

#239

Post by xondono »

fzeroracer wrote: post #142
exolymph wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems like a manifestation of Chesterton's Fence! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Chesterton%27s_fence

This is also, as it turns out, one of the most pertinent things a developer should be considering at all times. Sometimes we may get a bit too refactor-happy, not seeing the use behind a certain fix, a line of code or a strange function. Our first instinct isn't to understand it, but to tear it down, gleefully assuming that it's useless.

This reminds me of the infamous comment block:

// // Dear maintainer: //

// Once you are done trying to 'optimize' this routine,

// and have realized what a terrible mistake that was,

// please increment the following counter as a warning

// to the next guy

// total_hours_wasted_here = 42

Edit: to improve legibility

Re: The Hand Licking Incident

#240

Post by malydok »

Ntrails wrote: post #181
tragic wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember, during a thunderstorm, being utterly convinced that a war was being fought outside. I was terrified ...

I remember my father patiently explaining that the Giants Footsteps I could hear outside, as it lumbered towards me with malice, were in fact my eyelashes rubbing against the pillow as I blinked.

I believe I used to imagine my own heartbeat being the sound of footsteps as I was falling asleep.
Post reply on HN