The Hand Licking Incident • Hacker News Board

Re: The Hand Licking Incident

#331

Post by couchand » Tue, Jan 08, 2019, 2:39 AM UTC

pure-awesome wrote: post #246

couchand wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Sometimes possible, but not always. An executable test is good for documenting what a piece of code should do, but not always entirely sufficient for documenting why .

Though I agree that it's not always possible, I would contest your second point, at least for the majority of testing effort.

Sure, a unit test might just document what code is doing, because that's really the only why. But most testing effort should go into describing the why more carefully, which must be done at a higher level, as close as possible to how a user will interact with the thing.

Writing tests at the user's level and not getting bogged down in minutia requires careful factoring of the what and why. The what changes frequently, so if most of your tests are overly focused on the what, you will constantly need to update them as the code changes. The why changes much more slowly, so if your tests are written to exercise the why rather than the how, they will be resilient to changes in the implementation.

Of course, the what has to be somewhere, and when it changes there will need to be corresponding test updates, but these shouldn't require updating each individual test. The what can be kept cleanly factored out into helpers, leaving the why to remain as the essence of each test.

Re: The Hand Licking Incident

#332

Post by couchand » Tue, Jan 08, 2019, 2:51 AM UTC

javajosh wrote: post #253

couchand wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It's not always possible (or even advisable) to document with a test; to take two trivial examples from recent memory, one was a wrapping bug in IE 11 and the other was a typing issue with TypeScript. These issues required comments, not tests. (Granted, for the IE11 bug the ideal test harness would include a Win/IE virtual machine in a known state along with a good robot control and the ability to check screen geomet…

Your second example is a great example of how sometimes it's just not worth it. You're probably right that it makes sense to just write a comment and move along (after you've replicated the bug and filed an issue against the TypeScript compiler). Eventually it will get fixed, your team will upgrade their system, and you can remove the workaround.

I'd argue the first example illustrates my point quite well (but forgive me if this gets too ivory tower). It would seem highly unlikely that the wrapping bug is intimately coupled with whatever else the component is doing. It will likely come up again in some other situation, in this project or another. After all, some users will be on this browser forever.

All this suggests we would like to factor it out, in the name of the single responsibility principle and don't repeat yourself. And the extracted component should then be thoroughly tested to it's own why. That component's why, in particular, is to work around the browser bug, so a test specification that describes precisely which versions of Windows and IE are required to be worked around is actually exactly what you want.

As to good robot control and screen geometry, I don't think that's really science fiction anymore, unless your requirements are more exacting than mine.

Re: The Hand Licking Incident

#333

Post by mncharity » Tue, Jan 08, 2019, 4:58 AM UTC

xenadu02 wrote: post #93

taneq wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing that jumps out at me is that it took months and months to ask the simple question, "why are you doing that?" Also, in this case the undesirable behaviour had a perfectly benign and easily fixable root cause, but that's not always (or even mostly?) true. In many cases my kids will be misbehaving because they're not getting what they want, eg. icecream for dinner or to not go to bed on time. In cases like the…

Small children often can’t articulate the reasons why they do something. If pressed they’ll fabricate an answer that may or may not be nonsense (but isn’t true nonetheless). If you suggest a reason to them they’ll immediately say yes. If you offer a list of reasons they’ll immediately claim it’s the first or last choice offered. I have no doubt that she asked him repeatedly why he was doing it but either he couldn’t…

> Small children often can’t articulate the reasons why they do something. If pressed they’ll fabricate an answer that may or may not be nonsense

This reminded me of a UI Design principle, that users themselves often don't understand why they dislike a user interface, so their complaints and requests need to be explored, rather than taken at face value. Otherwise, when the first request is implemented, it may then replaced by another, and again, until the root cause is uncovered and addressed.

A very fuzzily remembered example was something like puzzling requests for data-entry form tooling, and the root cause turned out to be a multiple-page form lacking a "I can see it all, and see that it's right" confidence property, which was resolved not with tooling, but by simply making the form a single page.

Re: The Hand Licking Incident

#334

Post by Baeocystin » Tue, Jan 08, 2019, 5:10 AM UTC

benj111 wrote: post #303

vidarh wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I agree with the comment saying the only thing you can do with a two year old is prevent them from accessing it, your 2 year olds reasoning also demonstrates why spanking them does not work reliably in that kind of instance either. Kids that age are in some respect smarter than we often think, but in other respects they're totally helpless. So he's understood that the oven is hot, but not that it being hot mean…

Would you then suggest holding their hand on a hot thing (hot enough to be uncomfortable, not cause injury), so that they know what hot means? On the one hand it isn't far from smacking, on the other, it isn't a punishment as such.

Not speaking for the person you asked, but another thing my mother did when I was about the same age was to allow me to touch a hot stovetop when she knew it was still painful-hot, but not serious-burn hot.

I think it was the correct choice. My curiosity was sated, no punishment was involved, and she made the (for me, anyway) right choice of letting me experience the direct consequences of my actions when she knew they wouldn't be too bad.

Re: The Hand Licking Incident

#335

Post by OpenBSD-empire » Tue, Jan 08, 2019, 7:17 AM UTC

mikelyons wrote: post #183

adwn wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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(!!) No, the mother did ask: "I tried grilling him about why he was doing this so I could find some solution." The article doesn't imply that she asked him only after spanking him, and it seems unlikely that she did. Edit: fixed the quote from the article.

The article obviously states that she only asked years after spanking and abusing to get him to stop. Re-read it.

I don't get the downvotes, spanking IS physical and emotional abuse! Just because your parents abused you and you "turned out alright" doesn't mean it wasn't and isn't abuse!

Re: The Hand Licking Incident

#336

Post by jvvw » Tue, Jan 08, 2019, 7:38 AM UTC

adwn wrote: post #192

beaconstudios wrote: post #65

I tend to think that almost every time someone is doing something you don't understand or don't like, you're better off understanding the reason for the behaviour than trying to quash it. Even if you desperately want it to stop, they're clearly doing the thing as a means to address something so if you want to stop them using the current solution you should have a better solution to hand or the problem will once again…

Easier said than done in practice, particularly when dealing with smaller children, who either can't articulate the problem, or don't grasp the causal connections. Even more so when the unwanted behavior isn't just "weird", but also self-harming (and very abnormal behavior is often socially self-harming).

Or harming a sibling!

Re: The Hand Licking Incident

#337

Post by OpenBSD-empire » Tue, Jan 08, 2019, 8:34 AM UTC

porphyrogene wrote: post #23

You struck your child because he was licking his hands. Sometimes things are so hard and so overwhelming that you become a slave to your overwhelming misery and do things that you would never do with a sound mind. That does not mean that those actions are exempt from criticism. Most of the people on death row were likely of unsound mind when they did whatever landed them in that pointless punitive boondoggle. If you…

This flagged post is dripping in inconvenient truisms. Heed its warning in your parenting...

Re: The Hand Licking Incident

#338

Post by closeparen » Tue, Jan 08, 2019, 8:47 AM UTC

bitexploder wrote: post #225

closeparen wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did we read the same article? Conditioning failed. The solution was to respect the child as a complex being with trust and agency and ask him why. The parent specifically regrets her attempts to train the child like an animal.

There was a simple reason for the child’s behavior. Unknown to the parents. It will always be a dichotomy because you do not have perfect information as a parent. I don’t think I am saying to train children like animals, yet to use simple cause an effect to better reason about parenting decisions. If your hypothesis is wrong about the behavior your efforts to change it will fail.

Or, you know, build trust with the kid and ask, as this parent learned to.

Re: The Hand Licking Incident

#339

Post by jexah » Tue, Jan 08, 2019, 9:23 AM UTC

Hate to break it to you, but nobody was saying you should pour the alcohol on the fire. They said to put the fire out and you happened to be holding alcohol so you decided to throw alcohol on it.

Nobody said that the hand licking was "Bad Behavior [and] Absolutely Must Stop At Any Cost". They looked at you like you didnt know how to teach your child how to be polite in public, and you chose that you must do whatever it takes to stop yourself appearing that way.

The fact that you were trying to solve a problem without knowing the cause was silly, and I'm genuinely happy for you that you've learned from that experience, but the worst part is that you attribute the blame to outside forces.

Sentences like "They made me make the problem worse by telling me to fix it" and "It's their fault I failed because I didn't know how to solve the problem and guessed" come to mind.

"It might result in worse things happening to my relationship to my child than him being mad at me about this one thing. So I tried to comply with this expectation that my child needed to stop and I needed to be the one to make that happen."

There is more shifting blame in this paragraph. Somewhere you missed the part where "to comply" is to achieve the outcome of your child no longer licking his hands, not to assault him.

Society views parents who hit their kids worse than parents whose kids lick their hands, so I have no idea where you got the idea of compliance being to hit your child.

It's nice that you learned one lesson, maybe you could learn something from how you wrote the article, and if you can remember, how you felt when you wrote it.

Re: The Hand Licking Incident

#340

Post by wjnc » Tue, Jan 08, 2019, 11:02 AM UTC

jdietrich wrote: post #219

wjnc wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How can corporal punishment be a necessity in a life or death situation? I think you mean in preventing the recurrence of that situation. Screams and tears of fear and other emotions will suffice. One day my 3 yr old decided to bike away in a park near a pond. I cried when helpful bystanders found him about 1km away. (Don't search in concentric circles! Go for the playground.) We all share that memory even though a l…

Are screams and tears of fear any less traumatising than a smack?

Honest try to respond. I guess a child needs to associate the right emotion with a situation. Violence is a bad example as a resolution and fits with the emotion of anger. A scream or tears can be a result of fear. In case of danger fear for a childs life is a more fitting emotion imho than anger.