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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?

#131

Post by yen223 »

massysett wrote: post #111
nicbou wrote: post #78

In college, meeting someone that was better than me by every conceivable metric. You'd think that he beat me at one thing by neglecting another, but nope, the guy was excelling in every category. Perfect grades, involved in many communities, and generally pleasant to be around. There was no caveat, no excuse. Dude just straight up rocked. I have met more people like that while travelling. I felt badass riding my moto…

> You'd think that he beat me at one thing by neglecting another, but nope, the guy was excelling in every category. This is literally impossible. A person cannot be Einstein and Picasso at the same time. A person cannot be Steve Jobs and Pope Francis at the same time. We all have limited time in life, and it is only possible to excel in one thing by focusing on it and, as a result, not focusing on something else. Th…

Person A spends their 8 hours playing sports, reading books and socialising

Person B spends their 8 hours only playing video games

I would expect Person A to be better than Person B in every notable category, except for video game skill.

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

#132

Post by neom »

I went from helping build the community at deviantart to building a film company that won emmys to helping build digitalocean and somewhere along the way became a practicing alcoholic. I then proceeded to: have my fiancée leave me because I was an insufferable human, lose my startup because I was an incompetent human, and lose my health because I was an out of control human, in the span of 3/4 months.

That was very humbling. So was getting sober.

I used to believe I was a very very smart guy, now I'm content knowing I'm comfortably average!! :D

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

#133

Post by Stratoscope »

I posted a version of this story once before, but it bears repeating.

I was working at Tymshare, maintaining the assembler and linker for the PDP-10 or the Sigma 7 (I don't quite remember which).

The linker had a bad habit of leaving unused memory uninitialized. Every time you linked a program, the binary would be different. Functionally the same, but they wouldn't compare byte for byte. So my manager asked me to make sure the linker zeroed out all unused memory.

After linking a program, the linker printed a message something like this:

  8412 bytes used
   439 bytes free
The "bytes free" were that unused and uninitialized memory.

The linker was a mess of spaghetti assembly code, and it was a real pain to find and fix all of the places where it failed to clear memory.

My manager knew what a hassle this task was, and he was a chill dude. So just for fun I added a temporary message meant for his eyes only:

  8412 bytes used
   439 bytes free and it's pretty fucking clean
I figured he would get a laugh out of this and then I'd remove it.

Unfortunately my manager wasn't the first to see the message. His manager was giving a demo to a customer, and they were the first ones to see the message. Oops.

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

#135

Post by sublinear »

jeremiahbuckley wrote: post #48
leipert wrote: post #23

Ah, some of the things in this thread remind me of https://xkcd.com/1053/

I quote this all the time to people. There’s too much, we’re spread too thin. Ignorance shouldn’t be considered a big deal or a huge embarrassment. Not being ready to learn is a problem, but ignorance is sort of the default state now.

The fundamental issue is that regardless of how common ignorance is, you risk failure.

You're correct it's not the end of the world, but you'll need to catch up quick once you realize something and maybe even completely rethink plans. This isn't always a bad thing and the stuff you come up with from ignorance might be useful in other ways.

In my opinion, ignorance is just a fact of life. Too much of it can be a disaster, but just enough can spark meaningful creativity. Often times though, it's just something to immediately move on from because you have way more other stuff to do.

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

#136

Post by chrisbrauns »

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…

It was Gary Bernhardt in this talk: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=sCZJblyT_XM

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

#137

Post by mianos »

massysett wrote: post #111
nicbou wrote: post #78

In college, meeting someone that was better than me by every conceivable metric. You'd think that he beat me at one thing by neglecting another, but nope, the guy was excelling in every category. Perfect grades, involved in many communities, and generally pleasant to be around. There was no caveat, no excuse. Dude just straight up rocked. I have met more people like that while travelling. I felt badass riding my moto…

> You'd think that he beat me at one thing by neglecting another, but nope, the guy was excelling in every category. This is literally impossible. A person cannot be Einstein and Picasso at the same time. A person cannot be Steve Jobs and Pope Francis at the same time. We all have limited time in life, and it is only possible to excel in one thing by focusing on it and, as a result, not focusing on something else. Th…

This is what your parents tell you. I reality some people are good at anything they touch. Unreal at maths, writing, music, drawing, taste, music, spirt and very nice people. Not many. But I have known people who are known for their sporting achievements but I know how good they are academically. It is a downer at first untill you grow up.

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

#138

Post by koeng »

bee_rider wrote: post #120
koeng wrote: post #79

I’m learning swing dancing. It’s been humbling. It’s humbling because all my life, I’ve been really good at technology - I specialize in biotechnology and manipulating DNA, but am also fluent in programming (mainly python, go, lua) and am able to build hardware - even helped run a robotics startup for a while. Anything related to technology and science comes easily and naturally to me. This isn’t to brag, but just a…

I tried to learn to dance (hated it). It is a bit of a weird thing though, there as social events where people feel like it is OK to really try and pressure people into dancing. It is really annoying.

I've had very good experiences with swing dancing. People are so nice (LindyGroove in Pasadena). No pressure, and everyone is very accommodating to newbies. I'm not sure why, but there is a very high percentage of engineers.

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

#139

Post by rcxdude »

massysett wrote: post #111
nicbou wrote: post #78

In college, meeting someone that was better than me by every conceivable metric. You'd think that he beat me at one thing by neglecting another, but nope, the guy was excelling in every category. Perfect grades, involved in many communities, and generally pleasant to be around. There was no caveat, no excuse. Dude just straight up rocked. I have met more people like that while travelling. I felt badass riding my moto…

> You'd think that he beat me at one thing by neglecting another, but nope, the guy was excelling in every category. This is literally impossible. A person cannot be Einstein and Picasso at the same time. A person cannot be Steve Jobs and Pope Francis at the same time. We all have limited time in life, and it is only possible to excel in one thing by focusing on it and, as a result, not focusing on something else. Th…

The point isn't that 'someone can be the best at everything'. It's 'some people can be better in every category than some other person', which is a heck of a lot more reasonable. I've certainly experienced it. Similarly to the poster above, I went from top of the class to middle of the pack in university, and in part that was because I didn't focus on the academics, instead working on student projects that were valuable but didn't improve my grade. But there were people working on those projects that contributed more to those projects than I did, also came top of the class, were substantially more athletic than me (actually competing vs essentially no exercise), more social (also not super hard, but still), and somehow also got more (or at least better) sleep than me. It's a thing that happens.

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

#140

Post by blackhaj7 »

tchock23 wrote: post #122

I consider myself fairly literate and a decent communicator. Until recently I pronounced ‘segue’ how it is spelled. No one ever corrected me. I shudder to think about the meetings where I pronounced it incorrectly.

That is how it is spelt?!!

I had something similar: in front of quite a few people I said “albeit” but rather than pronouncing it “all be it” I said “al bite” as I had said it all my life. Mortifying

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