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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?

#101

Post by mahoro »

As a teenager, I discovered disassemblers/debuggers and became very enthusiastic about hacking and patching things. I reset the trial period counter on a few shareware apps, and the next "victim" that caught my eyes was encrypted RAR SFX archive. I thought it would be the perfect target.

I spent ~20 hours trying to find a routine that compares the entered password with the correct one. That humbling moment I realised there was no such routine, and moreover, most of disassembled code is just garbage.

[*] this is an encrypted archive combined with extractor in one .exe file.

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

#102

Post by bch »

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.…

So hard to resolve this in my head - unless it’s understood there’s a “detonate” button attached to the code, that it might escape, or worse, that it gets passed on or sold(!!) is a chilling thought.

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

#103

Post by RedNifre »

wizzwizz4 wrote: post #77
stevesearer wrote: post #10

I learned way into my adult life that I could just turn the swivel hook/latch to quickly unwind the cord on a vacuum cleaner. Before that moment I would manually unwind the cord just like I would wind it up. To make it worse, I even remember wondering why the swivel hook was there thinking it was poor design.

> Before that moment I would manually unwind the cord just like I would wind it up. As you should. Otherwise the cable gets twisted a few dozen times every time the vacuum cleaner is used.

You are rolling up your cables the wrong way if you run into that problem. Here's the right way: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PeLrxXUbq0g

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

#104

Post by lr4444lr »

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 think the other replies miss an important part of your comment:

Some of these projects were so late in their deadlines that had to be canceled

Speed is really important a lot more often than devs like to acknowledge when a company is small and fighting for its life to get revenue, let alone become profitable, and the code debt is often worth it. Fixing the code debt itself doesn't need to be any more thorough than necessary either.

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

#105

Post by lostlogin »

roncesvalles wrote: post #86
rpgwaiter wrote: post #44

I went from hacky hobbyist programmer to working on core business logic for a startup that eventually the whole company would rely on. I was mostly a one-person team at the company, and I kept a lot of my bad unscalable tendencies from making small fun projects. No formal testing, very little documentation, hundreds of “TODOs”, breaking API changes without really telling anyone, no QA process, no monitoring/reporting…

Probably more of a humbling moment for the CEO. They just demo'd something without both conferring with the devs and doing a practice-run themselves?

The sledge hammer to the cyber truck. Given that everyone knows that demos have a nasty habit of going wrong, what kind of madman tries something without testing it first?

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

#106

Post by steven_noble »

Mostly politics, where I have learned to stop predicting anything that can't be directly seen -- especially the future. For example: 1. Trump wins. I firmly predicted the opposite. To be fair, most polls predicted the same. But the lesson is to be less certain about the future. 2. No chemical weapon found in Iraq. I firmly predicted the opposite. To be fair, when that event unfolded, it was not that long since the world had last seen Iraq actually use chemical weapons against Kurdish insurgents. But the lesson is to be less certain about anything that can't be directly seen.

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

#107

Post by lostlogin »

oblib wrote: post #81

I was in my early 20s talking with a friend who was at least twice my age. I was bitching about a guy who'd look at the work I was doing who really didn't know squat about it and start telling me how I should be doing it. After listening to me for a bit he quietly said "Well, you can learn something from everyone if you focus on that." I spent a couple days pondering that. At first I tried dismissing it because he wa…

The other part of this is that someone can be right, and an arsehole.

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

#108

Post by [deleted] »

fifilura wrote: post #61
rpgwaiter wrote: post #44

I went from hacky hobbyist programmer to working on core business logic for a startup that eventually the whole company would rely on. I was mostly a one-person team at the company, and I kept a lot of my bad unscalable tendencies from making small fun projects. No formal testing, very little documentation, hundreds of “TODOs”, breaking API changes without really telling anyone, no QA process, no monitoring/reporting…

Would the code have been there and the demo have happened if you had done everything by the book?

[deleted]

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

#109

Post by bee_rider »

mablopoule wrote: post #96
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-conci…

Most scenarios only warrant fractional assing. Also this philosophy provides the opportunity to say “ok guys, this time… we have to whole ass this one,” which is always fun.

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

#110

Post by function_seven »

wizzwizz4 wrote: post #77
stevesearer wrote: post #10

I learned way into my adult life that I could just turn the swivel hook/latch to quickly unwind the cord on a vacuum cleaner. Before that moment I would manually unwind the cord just like I would wind it up. To make it worse, I even remember wondering why the swivel hook was there thinking it was poor design.

> Before that moment I would manually unwind the cord just like I would wind it up. As you should. Otherwise the cable gets twisted a few dozen times every time the vacuum cleaner is used.

I figure-eighted the cord onto those hooks to avoid that. Or alternated “over” and “under” with each pass around the hooks.

EDIT: When I say “over” and “under” above, I’m referring to the technique RedNifre linked to in the sibling comment.

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