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Ask HN: What has your work taught you that other people don't realize?

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Re: Ask HN: What has your work taught you that other people don't realize?

#591

Post by starpilot »

muzani wrote: post #114

Everything is a system. The economy, society, relationships, nature, traffic. You don't need math to reverse engineer a system. You just need to pay attention to it. You can say the right words to make a date happy. You can figure out which lane is the fastest route, better than Google Maps can. You don't need an app or data - your brain is a wonderful data processing machine. Don't be angry at the people who are ben…

Have you seen the Black Mirror episode with the Uber-esque tech company? The CEO is trying to placate a man in crisis over the phone. The CEO's support team starts feeding him via Slack de-escalation bullet points from their psychological experts. The man, bewildered and frustrated at the mechanical responses, stammers at him, "Why don't you talk like a normal fucking human being?!" The CEO then drops the "systematic" approach and talks to him like a person, from instinct, the heart, or whatever. Now you'll say that's a system too, but at some point the system is so riddled with exceptions that it becomes indistinguishable from chaos or intuition, and no longer is a useful system that can be described in any explicit way.

Re: Ask HN: What has your work taught you that other people don't realize?

#592

Post by neilkakkar »

hugey010 wrote: post #334
neilkakkar wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "You can figure out which lane is the fastest route, better than Google Maps can." Why do you think so? Given Google Maps has real time information about cars on both routes, I'd think it does a better job of aggregating this data than my intuition.

If you know an area well, you almost always can find at least slight improvements to the Google Maps route. When I know there's a closure or accident, I often look at Google Maps to figure out which way it's recommending and intentionally avoid that route.

How do you measure that your route was indeed faster?

Re: Ask HN: What has your work taught you that other people don't realize?

#593

Post by Waterluvian »

dcarmo wrote: post #467
Pigo wrote: post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So much this. Our time on this Earth is so short. I used to love video games, but now I'm trying to make up for the time I wasted playing Everquest. There's so many experiences out there waiting to be had.

Why do you consider the time playing Everquest wasted? It was what you wanted to do, you did it and had fun. Now you want to do something else and that's fine.

I _really_ enjoyed the first year of WoW. It was a childhood fantasy come true to explore the world I grew up with. The rest of the years it was just something I knew, a routine I was in, and where my social life was. Looking back, I really wish I walked away much sooner.

Re: Ask HN: What has your work taught you that other people don't realize?

#594

Post by sbarre »

DannyB2 wrote: post #567
jaggederest wrote: post #31

People have a tremendously distorted view of reality due to their own biases. Myself definitely included. "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!" - Upton Sinclair More concretely in the field of software engineering: Accurate, precise estimates are more expensive than the actual task itself. If someone asks you "how long until it is done", the onl…

> Accurate, precise estimates are more expensive than the actual task itself. That! That is is. You CAN get accurate estimates. But the cost of doing so is infeasible for any significant project. You can break things down into smaller pieces, easier to estimate. But the bigger the overall complexity, the more small pieces you will miss or fail to see. Or fail to see how parts interact. Or fail to recognize how far th…

After doing this for 25 years, I always say "you never get good at estimating, you just get less shitty at it"..

Lots of people don't like that statement, but I stand by it..

I eventually stopped trying to estimate time required to deliver a specific thing, and instead started working backwards and seeing what can be done in the time we have.

It's still estimating, but it's somehow a bit easier, especially if you're willing/able to re-evaluate along the way.

I know that's basically Agile but I removed all the ritualistic BS. ;-)

Re: Ask HN: What has your work taught you that other people don't realize?

#595

Post by bumby »

hans1729 wrote: post #408
yazanobeidi wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your comment made me think of this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bond_graph “Multi modal” system representation in graph format. You can represent an electric, hydraulic and mechanical system in one graph. Anything really by relating them to the substituent energy and power. Its representation allows you to easily extract the differential equation. Neat stuff.

>Anything really by relating them to the substituent energy and power. My brain is tickling, thank's a lot for the reference!

FWIW, control system theory resolves similarly. The response of a system (whether electrical, mechanical...) has the same basic concepts related to the energy of constituents defined by the differential equation of that system.

For example, specific systems have fairly well understood corollaries like a compressed fluid behaving as a mechanical spring within a system. Further, mass is akin to capacitor (stores energy), a spring is akin to inductor (stores energy), a damper is akin to a resistor (dissipates energy) in terms of their representation on the differential equation of their response. You might find some control theory an interesting read but I don't know if it speaks to exactly what you're looking for in terms of the broadest applicability.

Re: Ask HN: What has your work taught you that other people don't realize?

#596

Post by slumdev »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #584
slumdev wrote: post #549

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imagine approaching that codebase without basic foundational knowledge. What sort of mess would you get into then?

In my entire career (35 years), "foundational knowledge" has been important... maybe twice? Maybe once? Guessing, because I don't actually remember any instances. (I need to back away from that a bit, because you mentioned SOLID. That's important. The rule of 3 (now 5) is important. I didn't regard them as foundational, though, because I started in 1985, and SOLID wasn't really a thing then, and the rule of 3 wasn't…

Proper API design is software engineering, not computer science. And it does come with experience, but it's not necessary to start from zero.

Schools are coming around to the necessity of software engineering principles, and they're including an awful lot of solid software engineering content in their CS programs even at the undergraduate level nowadays.

Re: Ask HN: What has your work taught you that other people don't realize?

#598

Post by slumdev »

i_haz_rabies wrote: post #550
slumdev wrote: post #529

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a silly, silly attempt to knock down a point that should be self-evident. Success in life isn't a formal proof. Exercising every day, keeping your weight down, eating a Mediterranean diet, not smoking, having healthy relationships, and sleeping eight hours a night do not guarantee that you'll live to reach retirement age. However , they drastically increase your odds.

Since we're being pedantic: analogies aren't reality. Saying that a healthy lifestyle could improve your longevity doesn't in any way support the argument that a CS degree makes one more likely to understand big O.

> the argument that a CS degree makes one more likely to understand big O

This is 101-level content at most institutions. If you manage to graduate without understanding it, you are a magician or some kind of con man savant.

Re: Ask HN: What has your work taught you that other people don't realize?

#599

Post by dengsauve »

I learned at my first web dev job that no one outside the dev/marketing sphere knows just how much of their visit to e-commerce sites is tracked.

From technologies like Hotjar that record your mouse movements on a given webpage, to simple IP address logging (who visited this page on our site, from what referrer, etc.), people really have no clue how closely their actions are being monitored.

However, as with lots of data analysis, their personal information alone means almost nothing. Their data in the aggregate of all visitors' data is valuable for analyzing conversion rates, if and how their banners are working, etc.

I can't speak to the ethics of this, nor do I care to. I don't believe it's right to track so much interaction without duly notifying the customer it's happening, but I have very little aside from a sense of common courtesy to back that belief up.

The experience has given me a new appreciation for JavaScript blocker extensions, which before I had believed are no longer really needed. It's also given me an insight as to the value of an e-commerce page over a physical store location.

For example: Say I go to my local Target. If I'm looking at cameras, and the sales person asks if I need any help, or whatever, and I say no, they go away, and the interaction is over.

But lets say I go to their website. Immediately, a personal session with this page is created for me, even though I don't know it. I'm tracked from the home page, to their electronics sections, to the Camera subsection. My movements in figuring out the search filters is being tracked, my mouse movements over the available products is tracked, all adding data to create a "heatmap" of that webpage.

Even if I don't buy a thing, I've given them little pieces of information to be used in analyzing their site. My visit will be considered a failure to their marketers, and the data surrounding my failure to buy will be used to retool their site in the hopes of getting people like me next time.

Re: Ask HN: What has your work taught you that other people don't realize?

#600

Post by alpha_squared »

o-__-o wrote: post #178
alpha_squared wrote: post #157

- A vast majority of "cloud security breaches" are just a small setting/toggle that's misconfigured, sometimes intentionally for testing or otherwise, and never corrected until it hits the front page of a news site. - Imposter syndrome can be incredibly crippling. It can affect just about anyone at any senior level. Also, some have no problem taking advantage of that in others. - Appreciation of efficient code/design…

>Also, some have no problem taking advantage of that in others. what do you mean? can you provide an example?

While you may not think you're senior or perform at a certain level, your manager may see otherwise and use/expect that performance while suppressing you from a promotion/raise.
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