My current venture is has been a week away from insolvency for the past 6 months.
Ask HN: What are some of your recent failures?
91–100 of 118 posts
Re: Ask HN: What are some of your recent failures?
#92My life mostly. I'm 34, have a GED, have a bankruptcy, do not have a degree, do not have some sort of skill where I might be able to get around not having a degree like some sort of CS skills, I basically make a little less each year due to inflation and increase in insurance costs not being higher than the tiny merit based increase my employer gives, I've never had a relationship as an adult, I'm repeatedly denied j…
Do you have time to do things outside of work? For example running with a club of people or something. I just wonder if you are able to do things on the side that are real and difficult goals but that you can achieve on your own (though possibly after a lot of work). This obviously wouldn’t make your career life any better but you might have other things going on that would lead you not to describe life as a failure.
Re: Ask HN: What are some of your recent failures?
#93Oh sweet sweet failures! I'll start. I recently started trying to quit drinking for good, since it slowly turned from a thing that made me all charismatic and happy and jumping around, to a bitter angry man. This change started when I got together with my current girlfriend, since every time we would go out and have a (probably more than one) drink, I would get jealous (I'm very jealous and insecure, working on it) f…
Working on this myself, IWNDWYT
Re: Ask HN: What are some of your recent failures?
#94Most recent: trying to convince my superior to throw away our old Java monoliths (still running on Java5/6) and start from scratch with other technology than Java, in a cloud-native manner. Still, my superior is a super Java-fan and has summoned fears about changing everything, because people who worked on those monoliths are long gone from company.
Bit of advice I've found that the easiest way to introduce a new technology is to use it on something that is isolated and not totally critical first.
Re: Ask HN: What are some of your recent failures?
#95Last week. Updating DNSSEC infrastructure for a bunch of zones we manage. As part of that update I added extra DS* records at the parent zones. We were using SHA-256 and since our new signer generated SHA-384 signatures as well I included them. All nice and standard. Our tests were all good. dnsviz.net said everything was good, but... It turns out the version of Unbound that was included in older versions of Ubuntu a…
Can I ask why your organization bothers with DNSSEC, when virtually nobody in the industry does? Can I take a wild guess that you're located somewhere in Europe? DNSSEC is a dead letter in the US.
We're a backend registry operator. ICANN requires it for the new generic TLDs and all the ccTLDs we support expect the same "best practice".
ICANN that wonderful organization that requires us to have TLSA records for our RDAP servers even though browser support out the box is zero.
Re: Ask HN: What are some of your recent failures?
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can I ask why your organization bothers with DNSSEC, when virtually nobody in the industry does? Can I take a wild guess that you're located somewhere in Europe? DNSSEC is a dead letter in the US.
We're a backend registry operator. ICANN requires it for the new generic TLDs and all the ccTLDs we support expect the same "best practice". ICANN that wonderful organization that requires us to have TLSA records for our RDAP servers even though browser support out the box is zero.
You have my deep sympathies.
Re: Ask HN: What are some of your recent failures?
#97Most 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…
You are probably thinking of "consultants" and not consultants. Consultants comes in, fixes a problem, maybe educate employees about the problem and then leave.
Take management consultants, their main job is mostly to go in and fix other managers messes and possible educate them so it wont happen again or get them replaced.
Software consultants can often have very similar roles, a company have a problem with producing software, they take in a consultant to fix the issue because they themselves don't know how, the consultant comes in and fixes the issue and in the best case educates your workers so they can handle these issues themselves in the future. This is what a company typically wants when they hire a consultant to fix a problem, not a person who only solves already well defined problems.
Example: You have a new cloud based solution but prod is often broken, you hire a consultant to flesh out your deployment strategy to make it more robust, he comes in, creates a basic deployment strategy and shows your team how it works and how to add more tests to it, then he leaves. Production failures go down and your team is now stronger as a result. This is an ideal software consultant.
Of course you also have "consultants" who are just normal employees with less legal rights, those are more like what you are talking about.
Re: Ask HN: What are some of your recent failures?
#98Getting a job at a huge megacorp has shown to be a failure for me. Why? At my previous job - a small firm - I spent 8 hours actually working, each day. At my new job I am doing bureaucracy all days long, and very little actual work. Sometimes I come home without actually having had any real work done for the entire day. I flipped out after maybe 3-4 weeks, because Not Doing Actual Work turns out to be extremely stres…
During my time at a FAANG this was my exact experience, I became a worse engineer because of it.
Re: Ask HN: What are some of your recent failures?
#99I 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)
Wow that's harsh! How did you feel when you realized it?
Relieved actually, because it allowed to meet an overdue performance deadline.
Re: Ask HN: What are some of your recent failures?
#100I 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 vacu…
That's a good remark as well: we didn't have effective iterations with feedback, just long arcs of speculative changes.