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Ask HN: What are some of your recent failures?

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Re: Ask HN: What are some of your recent failures?

#71

Post by woutr_be »

I've been really struggling with my weight for the past few years. It has gotten to a point where it's affecting my social life and my mental health. I've always been fairly introverted and shy, but nowadays I find myself sitting at home wishing I was out with friends, or wishing someone would text me.

I'm a fairly active gym-goer, but I have incredibly bad eating habits, so instead of losing, or just maintaining weight, I've been slowly gaining it. This combined with my general shyness and low confidence, has caused me to just cancel social events, and stay home. And of course eat fast food to compensate. I'm struggling with sleep, and I'm at a point where I don't care much for work anymore (I've been arriving late, and leaving early for the past few months). I realize I'm borderline depressed, and my best guess is that my weight is the major cause of this.

Re: Ask HN: What are some of your recent failures?

#73

Post by pcnix »

p3rry wrote: post #39
dukeofharen wrote: post #2

Well, not recent, but a few years ago I deleted the production database of my fathers rental company (whoops). The (manual) backup was a week old. Luckily, all data was still there, but on paper (all signed contracts) so I worked overnight to restore all data from the paper pile. After this, I built a script that did a backup once a day and made sure I had to go through some extra hoops to connect to the production d…

Talking of deletion...I mistakenly deleted production server, yesterday! I was trying to create some AWS micro instance in Mumbai region which were for some reasons were not accessible. Eventually I had to create a mini instance. So I was terminating all those micro instances and some where by mistake one of my important prod instances got selected and boom. Though I had an AMI created few months back and it took aro…

I'd suggest turning termination protection on across production instances as a first solution, and consider some sort of infrastructure as code in the long term.

Re: Ask HN: What are some of your recent failures?

#74

Post by stevewodil »

cessor wrote: post #37

Most recent: Failed to get out of bed this morning at the time I comited to the night before. I wanted to get up at 8, be at work around 9, got in at 10/11. Fairly recent: I have been doing it like this for three weeks now My larger failure: I was hired as a contractor/consultant by a major media company earlier this year to help the team develop some cloud based software. I was hired to improve their testing karate.…

If you're having trouble getting out of bed, you can try using the 5 second rule to break your brain's patterns and activate the prefrontal cortex. Basically you count down from 5 out loud (saying the numbers aloud is important) and at 1 you just jump out of that damn bed like NASA launching a rocket.

Mel Robbins is the one to credit for this, there's more information here: https://melrobbins.com/blog/the-5-second-rule/

Re: Ask HN: What are some of your recent failures?

#75

Post by stevewodil »

cirgue wrote: post #54

I’ve been building a forum. The software part is done, I worked for like 9 months on and off to get it deployed, and now I just don’t have the motivation to do the work involved in building the community.

Could you generalize the forum software and get other people to make community forums based on your software (ie. sell it), instead of you doing it yourself?

Re: Ask HN: What are some of your recent failures?

#76

Post by aguzzi94 »

scrollaway wrote: post #59
aguzzi94 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You almost got me! I'll opt for a glass of chocolate milk, but thank you :)

Can I recommend a strawberry purée + lime + orange juice mocktail? It's my go-to non-alcoholic, non-caffeinated sweet drink and it's delicious!

Thank you sir. I'll take one, with a cherry on top please. Joke aside, I'll try one as soon as I can for real thanks

Re: Ask HN: What are some of your recent failures?

#77

Post by thoughtpalette »

Insanity wrote: post #20

A few days ago I updated to a new version of Go and noticed a perf regression on one of the programs for a cloudspanner backup. A really bad regression, so I thought the update must have changed something to cause this, and started to debug it. After a few hours, and help of a colleague, we figured out the issue. I wasn't using the companies wired connection but instead was using the much slower wifi..

Oh man, this reminds me. Trying to debug/work in changes for a web app and refreshing the production server instead of looking at localhost. Wondering why my changes are not working. It's taken over a half hour sometimes before realizing I'm looking at the wrong domain.

Re: Ask HN: What are some of your recent failures?

#78

Post by 0x445442 »

cessor wrote: post #37

Most recent: Failed to get out of bed this morning at the time I comited to the night before. I wanted to get up at 8, be at work around 9, got in at 10/11. Fairly recent: I have been doing it like this for three weeks now My larger failure: I was hired as a contractor/consultant by a major media company earlier this year to help the team develop some cloud based software. I was hired to improve their testing karate.…

> I was hired as a contractor/consultant by a major media company earlier this year to help the team develop some cloud based software. I was hired to improve their testing karate. When I started, I was constantly being blocked;

I'm going on a bit of a tangent here but this statement highlights some big problems in our industry. To me, being hired as a contractor/consultant means being hired to a job which satisfies some very specific requirements, not to be a butt in a seat on retainer to perform any immediate task which happens to come up.

As a contractor/consultant it seems the best approach would be to demand specific, well defined interfaces and use cases and to provide a solution which adheres to those interfaces and satisfies those use cases. If done right, your solution should be verifiable with acceptance testing. If the solution you provide meets those requirements you've fulfilled your end of the contract. The client is free to do whatever they'd like with that solution based on other criteria not in the contract. Based off your work, they're free to hire you for more work or not.

All this to say, don't get down on yourself. It sounds like there's an expectation mismatch between you and your client. It sounds like what you were expecting is closer to what I've described and what the client was expecting was another body to be on retainer for an hourly rate.

Re: Ask HN: What are some of your recent failures?

#79

Post by cirgue »

scrollaway wrote: post #60
cirgue wrote: post #54

I’ve been building a forum. The software part is done, I worked for like 9 months on and off to get it deployed, and now I just don’t have the motivation to do the work involved in building the community.

This reminds me of why you don't make your own game engine when you are building a game. You'll spend months or years working on exactly what isn't a game. You built a forum, that's great. If you set out to build a forum, you succeeded. If you set out to build a community, you just wasted a bunch of time on doing something only loosely related at best. So the question is, what did you actually set out to do? If you a…

I set out to build a product I would want to use from scratch. I succeeded in that I deployed a web app that does everything it's supposed to do (More or less a Metafilter clone). This is the first thing I've ever put on the internet, and I definitely learned a huge amount (my day job is in ML and most of my side projects are data/stats/ML related). I guess the answer is that I set out to do both. I did one, and have been dragging my feet on the other.

Re: Ask HN: What are some of your recent failures?

#80

Post by mojomark »

marmaduke wrote: post #3

I spent 3 years building a complex statistical model in Stan, only to double its performance with a trivial linear regression. The growth is realizing that sometimes variance in the data means that really cool model/code you want to write isn't useful, and there's always a trade-off between elegance and utility (if the two aren't in fact opposites)

Ha, this is a great reflection. In a different domain I had a similar experience - working for about 2 years on an unmanned vehicle design I thought was revolutionary, only for a colleage to review the design and point out that reverting to a traditional propulsion engine increases performance by a factor of 2. I felt like a balloon deflating; alas life goes on.

I suppose the lesson learned is avoid working in a vacuum of a project for long stretches and instead ask for a variety of consult from colleagues early and regularly.

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