Hacker Laws
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Hacker Laws
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Re: Hacker Laws
#2These types of lists are nice and I appreciate the time and effort put into making them. I do wonder how much utility they provide though? I personally find it a bit overwhelming. Like is idea that I sit down and memorize all this stuff?
In the past when lists like this come up I read a bit, then bookmark for later. Later never comes and now I just have this bookmark lying around amongst the thousands of others I have made over the years.
Maybe a more useful way to present this stuff is figure out a better way to give you the law relevant to the context in which you are in? For the sake of argument I could see something like this being useful:
INPUT
I am a `_developer_` working at a `_start up_` who `_needs to give_` `_an estimate_`
OUTPUT
- see Hofstadter's Law
Probably a non trivial task and I'm sure there's a law in that list that describes this phenomenon!
Re: Hacker Laws
#3These types of lists are nice and I appreciate the time and effort put into making them. I do wonder how much utility they provide though? I personally find it a bit overwhelming. Like is idea that I sit down and memorize all this stuff? In the past when lists like this come up I read a bit, then bookmark for later. Later never comes and now I just have this bookmark lying around amongst the thousands of others I hav…
I think it might be more useful to think of this as a list that could help you expose "unknown unknowns". These aren't ironclad rules, but they are each a piece of gathered advice that hold some truth in some context. So if you encounter one that makes no sense, then great, that's a potential blind spot that you've transformed from an "unknown unknown" to a "known unknown".
So let's take your example of Hofstadter's Law
> It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law.
So your reaction to this might be one of:
- Yes, that's a funny way to put it. I've spent many years estimating projects and matching up the final time taken, and even though i've gotten better at it, i still underestimate a little on each project. Here are different patterns i've seen for how my estimates end up going wrong. Here are different approaches i use now to try to mitigate how wrong my estimates end up being.
- Huh, that's interesting. I've just started being a manager, and i've been wondering why everything seems to take longer than i expect. Am i just the only one who is bad at estimating? Or is this some kind of problem that everyone encounters. Maybe i should look up techniques or ask advice on this subject.
- I don't know what this means. Why would anyone's estimates be wrong? Writing a website is like making a ham sandwich right? Once you do it once or twice, you must be able to estimate it perfectly every time.
Re: Hacker Laws
#4These types of lists are nice and I appreciate the time and effort put into making them. I do wonder how much utility they provide though? I personally find it a bit overwhelming. Like is idea that I sit down and memorize all this stuff? In the past when lists like this come up I read a bit, then bookmark for later. Later never comes and now I just have this bookmark lying around amongst the thousands of others I hav…
I tend to agree with you about generic awesome lists, but this one seems useful as a reference. Bookmarking for the next time I can't remember what the Lindy Effect is called.
..wait, it doesn't include the Lindy Effect :D
Re: Hacker Laws
#5I've always found the 90-9-1 rule fascinating. Especially when considering anonymous or semi-anonymous forums such as Hacker News or Reddit. These sites have large audiences and don't require users to log in. Therefore, they have an incredible amount of "lurkers" who do not comment, post, or vote. I think voting is an important aspect of content curation. So if a type of individual is more likely to vote, then that type of content will be more prevalent even if it is not necessarily the content the 90% want to see. But they're not voting so they're irrelevant.
In turn, the users who do actively post and comment have an amplified affect on what the 90% actually see. I find this to be particularly interesting when the culture of a userbase changes. I've been a long time user of Reddit, however rarely am I ever logged in. Overtime, I've felt that the culture of Reddit has changed to be much more liberal with posting low-effort comments. Many new users post on every post they see, while a previous generation of users may have dismissed that kind of behavior as being "Facebook-like" behavior. I think it may be another factor in the age old rule that the larger a site grows, the more the quality of discussion drops.
Re: Hacker Laws
#6These types of lists are nice and I appreciate the time and effort put into making them. I do wonder how much utility they provide though? I personally find it a bit overwhelming. Like is idea that I sit down and memorize all this stuff? In the past when lists like this come up I read a bit, then bookmark for later. Later never comes and now I just have this bookmark lying around amongst the thousands of others I hav…
I think it might be more useful to think of this as a list that could help you expose "unknown unknowns". These aren't ironclad rules, but they are each a piece of gathered advice that hold some truth in some context. So if you encounter one that makes no sense, then great, that's a potential blind spot that you've transformed from an "unknown unknown" to a "known unknown". So let's take your example of Hofstadter's…
>These aren't ironclad rules, but they are each a piece of gathered advice that hold some truth in some context.
This is spot on. There is a time and a place for these "laws" which is sometimes forgotten. Don't be dogmatic about following them. They will be detrimental to a team following them blindly.
Re: Hacker Laws
#7These types of lists are nice and I appreciate the time and effort put into making them. I do wonder how much utility they provide though? I personally find it a bit overwhelming. Like is idea that I sit down and memorize all this stuff? In the past when lists like this come up I read a bit, then bookmark for later. Later never comes and now I just have this bookmark lying around amongst the thousands of others I hav…
It's good to give it a read so you're familiar with the concepts, but then remember where the list is, or archive it so you can return to it.
Later down the line, you're going to encounter a problem and one of the ideas in the list will be helpful in framing the context of your problem. It may or may not help in finding a solution, but it can help articulate the problem to other people.
Re: Hacker Laws
#8These types of lists are nice and I appreciate the time and effort put into making them. I do wonder how much utility they provide though? I personally find it a bit overwhelming. Like is idea that I sit down and memorize all this stuff? In the past when lists like this come up I read a bit, then bookmark for later. Later never comes and now I just have this bookmark lying around amongst the thousands of others I hav…
Amelius' law: Management will always refer to Hofstadter's law as a myth or an excuse.
Re: Hacker Laws
#9Feels like I learned most of these from the fortune line in my .login file in the 90s, and now they form the landmarks of how I reason about problems. As a teenager, these quips were profound wisdom, and in fact some of them were.
Simple mental reference tools like the six reliability curves and mean time between failure, pareto distribution, network and cascading effects, shortest paths and solvability, recursion, mutability locking and versioning, complexity classes, logical contrapositives, dependent and independent probability, are all things the fortune file seemed to have quips about and if you had a sense of humor, you could map them to everyday situations. Hackers are an old trope now, but when you read these together again, it was a very rich and distinct culture and way of thinking. I appreciate seeing these put together.
Re: Hacker Laws
#10These types of lists are nice and I appreciate the time and effort put into making them. I do wonder how much utility they provide though? I personally find it a bit overwhelming. Like is idea that I sit down and memorize all this stuff? In the past when lists like this come up I read a bit, then bookmark for later. Later never comes and now I just have this bookmark lying around amongst the thousands of others I hav…
Amelius' law: Management will always refer to Hofstadter's law as a myth or an excuse.
Heh. I have been at the butt end of that one a few times. Another favorite of mine is when they push back with Parkinson's law: work expands to meet time available for its completion.