‘Strong Opinions, Weakly Held’ Doesn't Work That Well • Hacker News Board

Re: ‘Strong Opinions, Weakly Held’ Doesn't Work That Well

#171

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Jul 23, 2020, 4:38 AM UTC

modernerd wrote: post #89

xref wrote: post #84

Honestly I rarely remember the full details of why I chose a particular tech. I did the deep research, picked what I believed to be the best tool, implemented and deployed it and now that tool is my baseline. If you asked me a couple years later “why the hell did you chose that?!” I probably couldn’t give you many details that formed my opinion originally and couldn’t vociferously defend it by arguing minutiae of spe…

Architecture Decision Records (ADRs) are intended to help with that: https://adr.github.io/ https://github.com/joelparkerhenderson/architecture_decision... https://github.com/joelparkerhenderson/architecture_decision... They're overkill for small personal projects but can be helpful in big teams because it won't just be you wondering, “why the hell did they choose that?”.

[deleted]

Re: ‘Strong Opinions, Weakly Held’ Doesn't Work That Well

#172

Post by xref » Thu, Jul 23, 2020, 4:39 AM UTC

modernerd wrote: post #89

xref wrote: post #84

Honestly I rarely remember the full details of why I chose a particular tech. I did the deep research, picked what I believed to be the best tool, implemented and deployed it and now that tool is my baseline. If you asked me a couple years later “why the hell did you chose that?!” I probably couldn’t give you many details that formed my opinion originally and couldn’t vociferously defend it by arguing minutiae of spe…

Architecture Decision Records (ADRs) are intended to help with that: https://adr.github.io/ https://github.com/joelparkerhenderson/architecture_decision... https://github.com/joelparkerhenderson/architecture_decision... They're overkill for small personal projects but can be helpful in big teams because it won't just be you wondering, “why the hell did they choose that?”.

This is great, thanks for the links!

Re: ‘Strong Opinions, Weakly Held’ Doesn't Work That Well

#173

Post by aspenmayer » Fri, Jul 24, 2020, 2:23 AM UTC

ouid wrote: post #168

aspenmayer wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You inherited the DNA which built your brain from your parents. I believe they refer to the historical conditions which created selection pressures for your parents’ ancestors to survive rather than fail to live long enough to reproduce.

DNA is not a neural network, (and neither is a brain, for that matter). The comment is still decidedly nonsensical.

DNA is not a neural network (that we know of), and I wasn’t meaning to imply it was. However, the actual neural networks (that is, meatspace neurons arranged in a live human brain) are tested simultaneously alongside the DNA and they succeed or fail to be propagated as a result of their fitness in the environment; the interaction between DNA, behavior, and acquired traits was once thought to be solely fiction, but it is actual science[1], though we don’t know much about how this works yet. The brain is as involved with your behavior and your DNA; I think that was the common thread in OP’s point.

[1] https://www.cell.com/fulltext/S0092-8674(11)01341-9

Re: ‘Strong Opinions, Weakly Held’ Doesn't Work That Well

#174

Post by fapjacks » Wed, Jul 29, 2020, 5:53 PM UTC

austincheney wrote: post #164

fapjacks wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anybody who's done hiring will attest that "formal barriers to entry" (i.e. accreditation via certifications and degrees) say very little about a programmer's ability to produce valuable output. Hiring would not be "the big problem" in tech if one could simply outsource the hiring decision to such a formal barrier to entry. But, since formal barriers to entry are demonstrably useless signals specifically for hiring p…

> But, since formal barriers to entry are demonstrably useless Could you provide an example of such a barrier? Bar exams and medical review are extremely valuable to other industries. They demonstrate both competence and ethics. Since software is utterly lacking anything resembling a formal qualification barrier it’s hard to say a thing isn’t valuable. It doesn’t make sense to disqualify something that was never ther…

> Could you provide an example of such a barrier?

I did mention more than one example in the first sentence of my reply: CS degrees and certifications.

> Since software is utterly lacking anything resembling a formal qualification barrier it's hard to say a thing isn't valuable.

This is circular logic by either of our propositions. For if my statement were true (that "formal barriers to entry [in the context of software, as explicitly mentioned multiple times in the thread] are demonstrably useless") then it is not valuable as a barrier to entry [in the context of software, as explicitly mentioned multiple times in the thread]. However since you also assert that "software is utterly lacking anything resembling a formal qualification barrier" and this necessarily includes CS degree and/or certifications then that "thing" is equally not valuable as a barrier to entry.

What you've done is conflated your relative moral value judgment (approximately that there "should be" a formal qualification barrier to entry) with another separate relative moral value judgment (that existing barriers to entry are not useful or are so useless as to fail to exist). These are two different propositions. Also please do not attack the character of your interlocutor, for your suggestion that I have "never met such a burden for any professional industry" is wrong but also just pretty lazy.

If you believe you have a way of generating a useful hiring signal that beats doing a work sample, I'm sure any number of people around here would throw money at you to build a company around it.

Re: ‘Strong Opinions, Weakly Held’ Doesn't Work That Well

#175

Post by WhompingWindows » Thu, Jul 30, 2020, 2:30 PM UTC

travisjungroth wrote: post #141

WhompingWindows wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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