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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?

#301

Post by dusted »

adrianmonk wrote: post #88
dusted wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait what ? I've seen two different "systems", one where you do a quick pull on the cord and it spins back up, and one where there's a "roll up" button on the machine which winds up the cord, but I've never heard of anything you can do to make the unrolling easier ? Video ? Link? What is this magic you talk of ?

> it spins You're thinking of a vacuum cord that automatically winds onto a spring-loaded reel, commonly seen on canister vacuums. They're talking about an upright vacuum where you manually wrap the cord around two hooks. One of the hooks can be rotated so that it no longer keeps the cord in place. Look at the two black hooks in front of the yellow cord in this picture: https://f.media-amazon.com/images/I/61XbxqH6%2B…

Euro-mind-blown I didn't know they still made those, I only know them from old cartoons :o Thanks for clearing that up for me! :)

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

#302

Post by Simon_ORourke »

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…

I met someone similar in a previous company, but was way more objectionable than your college buddy. Some ex-Google DevOps bozo who just made it his life to snipe at other people's code and projects and undermine them whenever possible. I was talking to someone this bozo just called out in a very public forum, and asked why he wasn't furious and the response was more enlightening than anything - "That's all he's got", which was true - the DevOps bozo had absolutely no other life outside his small corner of tech and needed constant reassurance of their own superiority through publicly critizing others work.

In the end, folks just ended up ignoring whatever this person said - talking it with a grain of salt.

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

#303

Post by simonebrunozzi »

Oh, the day I lost 15% of my net worth because of a single bet/investment. This was after a period of months during which I had already lost perhaps 30% of my TNW (Total Net Worth).

It hurted so much. Soo much. I felt dumb. Unlucky. That the world was unjust.

I proceeded to analyze why I did that investment, and if it was a bad or good idea. It was indeed - I didn't know enough about that investment, and I realized I was essentially gambling.

By the way, in my view, most people that invest in crypto these days are engaging in a form of gambling; or in a Ponzi scheme where they try to be on top of the pyramid. (if you disagree, there is no need to downvote me - just comment on why you disagree).

I realized then that the hardest thing to make, or keep, money, is discipline. Greed and FOMO are your enemies. The best lessons are the ones where you pay a high price. No pain, no gain, applied to investment.

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

#305

Post by beautron »

wanderingmind wrote: post #257

Meeting less competent people be extremely successful in life compare to the more competent folks. Through my life, I have seen people less curious, less innovative, no passion to learn, not interested in working hard, but are good at gaming the system excel and succeed. They become rich, financially independent, have great success. While people much smarter than me, more curious and innovative fail again and again t…

This rings true to me, perhaps because I struggle with this one.

I used to think I was destined for success, because I'm good and creative at many things, and am curious and can teach myself things.

But: I expected the system to integrate me. I realize now that, unless you're lucky, it's up to you to integrate yourself into the system.

It's a bummer to be underpracticed at this, and to be integrating suspiciously late. Feeling your potential, your ability to create great value for the system (while hopefully inspiring the system to also take good care of you). But instead only tapping a small fraction of your capability, because you haven't managed to link yourself in right.

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

#306

Post by khazhoux »

jasonkester wrote: post #291
kaeruct wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hola querido. The Spanish word for bread is Pan, not Pain. Pain is French :)

Moved to France (possible out of shame) so that probably explains it. That’s what my Spanish sounds like these days. (Fixed)

If you like good French soup, you should definitely try soup du jour. It's amazing!

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

#307

Post by khazhoux »

jnsie wrote: post #128

Like many other people who should know better, I tried my hand at day-trading. I bought some course by someone who in hindsight I'm certain made more money off selling courses than they ever did off of day-trading. I got my account setup, had enough funds to allow me to trade short timeframes (I forget what this was called but there is a rule where you need X amount of money before you can do more than Y trades in Z…

I did a short-lived attempt at day-trading 15 years ago. Bought a few tens of thousands of NFLX, NVDA, and AMZN. Sold it all maybe a week later and made a couple thousand bucks, which I thought made me pretty smart.

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

#308

Post by remoquete »

bloomingeek wrote: post #225

In 1993 I was interviewed for an operating job in a power plant for a major airline, assigned to their data center. At my current job, I was working in a high rise office building with sixty-six floors. The operating system computer was a JC8520, which was running a version of MS-DOS. All commands had to be typed in correctly or nothing would happen. While operating the plant, several commands had to be entered every…

> While operating the plant, several commands had to be entered every shift

That reminds of the bunker from Lost.

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

#309

Post by chr15m »

ChicagoDave wrote: post #280

In 1994 my boss asked me how long a set of changes would take in an existing billing application. I took a day to look at the code and I said 6-8 weeks. He said we (me with his guidance) could do it in a week, maybe two. I adamantly disagreed. We proceeded to spend about 3 days writing a detailed document on the logic required. Once he was satisfied, he asked me to take a final look at the code and revise my estimate…

This is a great story. Similarly I've learned that any amount of planning is better than no planning. Simply drawing a few mock-ups of what you're going to build will make things go a lot better. It's cheaper to fix mistakes at the design phase than the implementation or production phases.

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

#310

Post by coolgoose »

satvikpendem wrote: post #205
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…

Funny to see this comment which is in stark contrast to the current top comment [0]. I suppose in reality it's all about balance. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40557571

I think it's a bit more nuanced.

One complains about enterprise level architecture in run of the mill small projects.

One complains about bugs, which should just be covered by tests, nothing that should sound or be complicated.

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