So you've made a mistake and it's public • Hacker News Board

Re: So you've made a mistake and it's public

#361

Post by austincheney » Sat, Nov 14, 2020, 7:29 AM UTC

justin_oaks wrote: post #2

> What should I do when I see someone else is making a mistake? > When you see others making mistakes, first help them see their mistakes and deal with them (e.g. by recycling this text, or by independently offering your analysis and answers to Steps 1 and 2 above). > Remember you make mistakes too, and be tolerant of the time it may take people to accept that they have made a mistake. (But you don't need to allow th…

Kindness doesn't solve a problem. It's better to employ empathy and reassurance which aren't necessarily the same thing as kindness. It seems that is perhaps what you otherwise implied.

Re: So you've made a mistake and it's public

#362

Post by anticristi » Sat, Nov 14, 2020, 7:33 AM UTC

aequitas wrote: post #95

lapetitejort wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It should be noted that you should contact them about their mistake in the most private way possible, then escalating slowly as the need arises. This follows the "praise in public, punish in private" maxim.

This makes me think, it is opposite to what mostly is used in open source projects that have bugtrackers. Github is filled with countless 'mistakes' (issues/pr's) people made in the code they published. Should there be some kind of way to make issues private? Before I was into open source I was always afraid to show my code to anyone because of the critique I could expect. But some coworkers helped me get the confide…

I love critique. It means that someone cares!

I contributed to launching a few products. After countless hours of design debates, code writing, code review, the baby was finally ready to see the world ... but nobody cared. Not even a drive-by troll bothered writing "this is completely useless".

My Motto: "That product sucks, but wow! It made it on the shelf."

Re: So you've made a mistake and it's public

#363

Post by ayewo » Sat, Nov 14, 2020, 7:39 AM UTC

jackcosgrove wrote: post #338

Spinnaker_ wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're probably right. I've been reading HN for 10+ years now and just assume it's still the best location for hackers. So what's the newer, cooler, current version of what HN was in 2010?

I've heard the community at Indie Hackers is more supportive and less jaded.

The similarity between the HN & IH communities only runs skin deep with the use of ‘Hacker’ in their names.

Is IH are more supportive crowd? A resounding yes, but that’s because as a group it was designed as a support mechanism for people looking to earn a salary by working solo.

HN is like the opposite of IH with respect to salary: it’s maintained by a VC entity and many hackers here draw high salaries working for trillion-dollar, billion-dollar and upstart tech companies.

HN was designed to be a water cooler for stating & demolishing arguments, with the occasional cheer to YC-funded startups, so it’s not surprising there’s a lot of healthy skepticism which often comes across as cynicism.

Re: So you've made a mistake and it's public

#364

Post by FireBeyond » Sat, Nov 14, 2020, 7:47 AM UTC

aequitas wrote: post #95

lapetitejort wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It should be noted that you should contact them about their mistake in the most private way possible, then escalating slowly as the need arises. This follows the "praise in public, punish in private" maxim.

This makes me think, it is opposite to what mostly is used in open source projects that have bugtrackers. Github is filled with countless 'mistakes' (issues/pr's) people made in the code they published. Should there be some kind of way to make issues private? Before I was into open source I was always afraid to show my code to anyone because of the critique I could expect. But some coworkers helped me get the confide…

I think though there are still some elements, there is also a difference between genuine mistakes (bugs) and "knowing the wrong thing, and choosing to do so".

Re: So you've made a mistake and it's public

#365

Post by zmmmmm » Sat, Nov 14, 2020, 8:07 AM UTC

throw7 wrote: post #111

macspoofing wrote: post #23

I'm not sure apologizing publicly has made anything better for any individual, especially in the current moral panic climate. Mobs don't accept apologies. Public apologies stamp official guilt on the individual and therefore serve as a license for the mob to further punish them because now they have admitted their fault and therefore are 'officially' guilty of the crime. Public apologies, therefore, are the metaphori…

There's only one rule for apologizing: You apologize if you actually believe that you've done wrong. NEVER apologize for something you believe was done correctly or in good faith or for "PR" or whatever else.

The problem is the "good faith" bit ... that often isn't visible downstream, and to external stakeholders it looks like you are making excuses.

For example, if I make a commitment to somebody and then circumstances outside my control prevent me from fulfilling it, I may very well say "it's not my fault, apologising would be insincere". But to an external stakeholder what they see is they are wearing consequences and I am not accepting accountability. There are a million shades of gray according to how much I could / should have anticipated the eventuality ... but that makes it really not simple to make this kind of call, and I would have to say, if you are going to err, I would rather err on the side of apologising than not.

Re: So you've made a mistake and it's public

#366

Post by rendall » Sat, Nov 14, 2020, 8:39 AM UTC

d_tr wrote: post #120

justin_oaks wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed. Whenever I get cut off on the freeway, I try to remember the times when I accidentally cut someone off but had no way to express "Oops, sorry!" We all get it wrong sometimes.

In my country we raise our hand to say "thank you", but I also do this to say "I 'm sorry" when there is no other safe way to communicate.

That's neat. What country is that?

Re: So you've made a mistake and it's public

#367

Post by Tuna-Fish » Sat, Nov 14, 2020, 8:43 AM UTC

bzbarsky wrote: post #358

contravariant wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, guess he really didn't like tax collectors.

You have to keep in mind that the way tax collection worked in that area at the time is that it was contracted out by the state. The contractor needed to deliver some amount of money to the state, and empowered to gather money from people; the difference between what they gathered and what they delivered to the state was their profit. Tax collectors operating within this incentive structure were not likely to be very…

And just to drive the point home, the tax policy that this caused was occasionally literally genocidal, in the most strict meaning of the word.

This was possible because it was a slave society, and it was possible for the tax collector to collect your children into slavery in lieu of unpaid taxes. In some areas in Anatolia, which were close to the border of the empire and thus had a significant military presence that the tax collectors could fall back on, so the local population had no possibility to push back, entire societies were ended because the Roman publicans collected all children once they reached the age where they could be profitably sold (circa ~10 years or so, and sold usually to sexual slavery), and did so for long enough that the populations collapsed, never recovered, and were eventually replaced by other populations transplanted from elsewhere in the empire. (Later, the power of the publicani was seriously curtailed, in small parts because even the Romans thought that some of their practices were abhorrent. Albeit mostly because of internal power struggles with the senator class.)

So yes, people in the provinces had plenty of reasons to hate the tax collectors.

Re: So you've made a mistake and it's public

#368

Post by rendall » Sat, Nov 14, 2020, 8:51 AM UTC

harlanji wrote: post #167

justin_oaks wrote: post #2

> What should I do when I see someone else is making a mistake? > When you see others making mistakes, first help them see their mistakes and deal with them (e.g. by recycling this text, or by independently offering your analysis and answers to Steps 1 and 2 above). > Remember you make mistakes too, and be tolerant of the time it may take people to accept that they have made a mistake. (But you don't need to allow th…

I’m glad others out there see it this way. I made a minor mistake, and a former employer and manager used it to make me totally unable to work again by blowing it up as much as possible. It’ll blow back on them eventually, but in the meantime I’ve been made homeless and lost all my friends. Since lawyers are involved and profit from my mistake looking worse than it was, there will never be an honest reconciliation. T…

That's awful. I'm sorry to hear it. Feel free to reach out to me if you want someone to hear your tale

Re: So you've made a mistake and it's public

#369

Post by loup-vaillant » Sat, Nov 14, 2020, 8:55 AM UTC

I made such a mistake over 3 years ago. Only found about it 2 years ago. Mostly, I was acting on insufficient information, and a bit of intuition. I identified the kind of error I made, noted what I had to do to avoid a repeat —which never happened since. I fixed then admitted the mistake, a couple days after finding it. It's standard procedure. I could have swept it under the rug, though I never considered it.

There wasn't much drama then. Just some mockery I wasn't even aware of (I didn't follow Twitter). I learned of it one year later, when some institution "awarded" the worst mistakes (they wrote pretty funny piece).

> Yes, there may be some drama, in the short term.

It was the only mistake of any consequence I've made in over 4 years working in this domain. Yet some people still use that one error to publicly question my competence and my ethics. As if they didn't realise the perverse incentives that results from punishing honest disclosure.

Re: So you've made a mistake and it's public

#370

Post by LockAndLol » Sat, Nov 14, 2020, 9:00 AM UTC

That's good advice for a world without bored people looking for entertainment in the form of other people's misery.

In this current world, people will send you death threats for releasing a game too late. You'll get doxxed for an unpopular opinion and you'll be beheaded for showing a picture of a person.

It feels like saying you were wrong will only put fuel onto t he fire. But I can only hope I'm wrong.