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Ask HN: What was your most humbling learning moment?

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Re: Ask HN: What was your most humbling learning moment?

#91

Post by throw46365 »

swarnie wrote: post #31
throw46365 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, always if there's a street that was put down facing like that. Commonplace in new towns laid down over very large areas. In the UK, oh wow, you will encounter some weird numbering issues. I live on the corner of a street in a very complex, 400 year old area, and I am forever leaning out of the window to shout instructions to utterly bemused couriers.

28 being next door to 47 at the end of a cul-de-sac can really mess with people. Also on older estates where spare green spaces have been used up by additional houses so you end up with 21,23,25,25A, 25B. The UK can be weird....

Right.

And if you live in some regularly redeveloped bit of a town that grew in the Georgian era you can end up with clusters of houses that have almost no discernible pattern left over; I live in such a house. The naming around here is astonishingly complex, such that if I explain it too much I would identify where I live.

(I have three physical neighbours -- that is, I share walls with them. And we are on three different roads, legally speaking)

The plus side is that as you get to know the couriers who you've helped, you begin to understand that your packages will never go missing. There is an Amazon driver who smiles from ear-to-ear when he delivers for me, and I even get good service from Evri.

I move soon, and since I'm the only person here who works from home who has a clear view of where all the delivery drivers get out of their vehicles wearing a confused look, I expect parcel delivery accuracy to drop for my neighbours when I'm gone.

Re: Ask HN: What was your most humbling learning moment?

#92

Post by ckrapu »

In my first digital design class, my physics professor (who I took 6 classes with and respect very much) took a look at my breadboard computer with no consistent color coding for groups of wires and overall bad layout. He said it was bad and that I should start over from scratch in front of the whole class.

Re: Ask HN: What was your most humbling learning moment?

#93

Post by spoiler »

hu3 wrote: post #83

Learning that some folks can produce so much value with crappy code. I've seen entire teams burn so much money by overcomplicating projects. Bikesheding about how to implement DDD, Hexagonal Architecture, design patterns, complex queues that would maybe one day be required if the company scaled 1000x, unnecessary eventual consistency that required so much machinery and man hours to keep data integrity under control.…

Like with all things in life, one need to find balance within the two extremes you posted.

There's overcomplicated, there's too basic, and then there's simple.

I think it's fine adding just enough complexity and abstraction to make something malleable and manageable in the future

Re: Ask HN: What was your most humbling learning moment?

#95

Post by ein0p »

Meeting a couple of people with eidetic memory in college, and then again meeting a few real world geniuses at a research lab I worked at. At that point I realized that “it’s not the brains that got me to where I am”. Ironically I’m more successful than both eidetic memory dudes and most of the geniuses. But I’d frankly trade all my success for better memory. What they lacked was tenacity. I have that in spades.

Re: Ask HN: What was your most humbling learning moment?

#96

Post by mablopoule »

hu3 wrote: post #83

Learning that some folks can produce so much value with crappy code. I've seen entire teams burn so much money by overcomplicating projects. Bikesheding about how to implement DDD, Hexagonal Architecture, design patterns, complex queues that would maybe one day be required if the company scaled 1000x, unnecessary eventual consistency that required so much machinery and man hours to keep data integrity under control.…

I don't remember where I saw this quote, but... "It's okay to half-ass something, when all you need is half an ass".

EDIT: Totally agree about the 'important mindest for startup', I had a similar eye-opening experience, working in a startup with 'cowboy' code that was actually quite good, but I had to unlearn a bit of stuff I read as a junior/mid-level developper.

It was code that was well-architected, had well-concieved data structure, and had business value, but every "professional" coder would deem bad-quality, since it had no unit test, did some stuff unconventionally, and probably would have many linter warning.

Re: Ask HN: What was your most humbling learning moment?

#97

Post by [deleted] »

swarnie wrote: post #31
throw46365 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, always if there's a street that was put down facing like that. Commonplace in new towns laid down over very large areas. In the UK, oh wow, you will encounter some weird numbering issues. I live on the corner of a street in a very complex, 400 year old area, and I am forever leaning out of the window to shout instructions to utterly bemused couriers.

28 being next door to 47 at the end of a cul-de-sac can really mess with people. Also on older estates where spare green spaces have been used up by additional houses so you end up with 21,23,25,25A, 25B. The UK can be weird....

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: What was your most humbling learning moment?

#98

Post by deaddodo »

king_phil wrote: post #8
spcebar wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you pull a blind cord to the right it stays up, if you pull it to the left it comes down. My whole life I've just been jiggling and tugging the cord to get it to stay or come down.

Definitely not in the German speaking countries, we have different blinds. You pull a cord down for the blinds to go up, and vice versa. Then the cord is tied to a hook or button.

No offense, but HN and Reddit are both American created, operated, and primarily trafficked sites. It's not unusual to assume an American audience.

If OP came out assuming a Nairobi design that wasn't used anywhere else, or if they went to the heise.de forums and posted the above; now that would be odd/call-out worthy.

Re: Ask HN: What was your most humbling learning moment?

#99

Post by wizzwizz4 »

riehwvfbk wrote: post #69
daymanstep wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honest question and genuinely curious: what is difficult about showing up on time?

Untreated ADHD can make this really really really hard. And the worst part is: nobody will understand because it is not hard for most people, so everyone assumes that being late is a character issue. To understand how hard it is, imagine that you have periodic blackouts during which you completely forget not only that you need to be on time for work, but that work is a thing that exists in this universe. You cannot c…

We should make it a social expectation that you can show up any time ±1 hour from the official start time of your office job. That way, "I'm ready half an hour early: I could catch the earlier train" becomes an actual thing, and you don't have to kill time for half an hour and risk missing two trains in a row.

Re: Ask HN: What was your most humbling learning moment?

#100

Post by gota »

lubujackson wrote: post #6

I was in my 20s before I realized even numbered houses are always on one side of the street and odd numbers on the other. Literally no excuse for not figuring that out.

I learned the numbering rule (in Brazil) at school - but have friends who didn't know it far into adulthood.

The rule, ~if I remember correctly (and matches my experience)~ confirmed by Googling is:

1) distance in meters from the beginning of the street to the start of the terrain where the building is in;

2)rounded to even number on the lefthand side and to odd number on the righthand side of the street/road

I guess knowing the rule isn useful so you know if you are at Soandso st. 200 and yout destination is Soandso st. 2200 thats a 2km walk there

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