"No one should be the boss of anybody" - elon musk
Ask HN: Advice that changed your life?
171–180 of 567 posts
Re: Ask HN: Advice that changed your life?
#172My operating systems professor liked to engage his audience during lectures, so it was commonly more of a dialogue than a lecture. At one point he gave us some problem to consider, we didn't know what to make of it, so we started asking how to approach this. His reply:
"You're asking me? Soon enough you'll be engineers. You're the experts people will come to for solutions."
More of a reminder than advice, but it affected my approach.
Other, unrelated, but also life-changing, even though I don't remember who gave it:
"Never explain yourself unless explicitly asked to."
EDIT: This one is from my Argentinian AirBnB host in Switzerland:
"If you didn't make time for it, it wasn't actually important enough for you."
Re: Ask HN: Advice that changed your life?
#173I was one of the people who implemented Google's top-level domain system. One day in the microkitchen I met Vint Cerf and told him what I worked on. He very curtly told me that he hates generic top-level domains, they confuse consumers, and ICANN should have been focusing on making .com / .org / .net better instead. It surprised me when I learned that I'd spent the last four years of my life working on a project wher…
> He very curtly told me that he hates generic top-level domains, they confuse consumers Perhaps someone should tell you that consumers hate advertisements, and they are confused by them too :)
This kind of employee shaming is the reason we see less and less people posting amazing anecdotes as the one above.
Re: Ask HN: Advice that changed your life?
#174‘The fate of the fool will overtake me also.
What then do I gain by being wise?”
“This too is meaningless.”
the days have already come when both have been forgotten
Re: Ask HN: Advice that changed your life?
#175My mother told me to not care what other people thought. She also told me that words can't really hurt people ("sticks and stones..."). She also believed its "mean" to have any preference about people, calling it a version of "keeping score". In fact, "keeping score" was one of the worst things you could be accused of in my household. Her advice fails to accept the reality of social and emotional needs. It also fails…
To be fair to your mother, this particular advice and view was rampant when I grew up in the 80s/90s. My experience was that this is quite backwards. Physical altercations at school didn't hurt that much, but the name calling, social shunning and constant verbal put down was very painful and has affected my whole life.
I’d agree. I was hurt by bullying enough that if I had ever made it big I would have found the most outrageous bullying case I could find and try to sue a school district out of existence? Maybe if teachers thought they could lose their pension maybe they would put a stop to bullying.
Re: Ask HN: Advice that changed your life?
#1761. learn to firmly say "NO", no matter how difficult it sounds.
2. If YOU think "what will world think", then what will world think? (it sounds way better in my mother tongue, but basically don't care about what will people think about you)
3. You don't work for the company, the company works because of you.
Re: Ask HN: Advice that changed your life?
#177one was "if you want someone to like you, become a person they would want to like." turns out there's lots of reasons why someone might like someone else. I just assumed they only liked people for the same reasons I did (like vanity).
another was "women don't owe you just because you're a nice guy." took a while to accept that I had been telling myself a lie, that I would naturally attract women just from being nice, and was getting subconsciously angry at women when my presumption didn't pan out.
and another was "is this what they want, or what you want?" works in a lot of situations. I think it helped me have more compassion/empathy, but also avoid situations where one of us would have been unhappy.
Re: Ask HN: Advice that changed your life?
#178I'm happy to see some of the examples here are of bad advice.
The worst, specific piece of advice I received was when I was choosing a major in my senior year of HS, which informed where I went to college. For some paths like engineering you need to know before you matriculate at some schools.
The bad advice which was handed out in 2001, was that CS as a career had peaked and all those jobs created during the dotcom boom would be outsourced, so there was no point in majoring in it anymore.
I unfortunately took that advice for a few years, before realizing it was bunk and having to spend extra time in school to enter a career in software.
Re: Ask HN: Advice that changed your life?
#179Not really an advice, but just a phrase: “Can you show me something you have done?”. My brother was introducing me as a developer for a project he was responsible and the supervisor wanted to meet me first. I was prattling about all the stuff I know about and I was real proud about it. He interrupt me with this. That’s when I realise all the things you know don’t really matter to people if you can’t actually solve th…
Had a similar epiphany. Worked really hard on it and while it kinda changed my life, I eventually realized I'm simply not a builder type person.
Re: Ask HN: Advice that changed your life?
#180I was one of the people who implemented Google's top-level domain system. One day in the microkitchen I met Vint Cerf and told him what I worked on. He very curtly told me that he hates generic top-level domains, they confuse consumers, and ICANN should have been focusing on making .com / .org / .net better instead. It surprised me when I learned that I'd spent the last four years of my life working on a project wher…
"One day in the microkitchen I met Vint Cerf and told him what I worked on. He very curtly told me that he hates generic top-level domains, they confuse consumers, and ICANN should have been focusing on making .com / .org / .net better instead." You're lucky you didn't meet Stanislaw Ulam, who, when anyone told him about a project they were working on always responded with "What is that compared to E=mc^2 ?"
That's totally not the same thing though. Vint Cerf wasn't telling me I was but a mere footnote compared to his invention of TCP/IP. He thought gTLDs were actively harming the Internet.