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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?

#331

Post by Beretta_Vexee »

jl6 wrote: post #319

At provincial grade school, I was top of most classes with very little effort. It made me lazy. But in higher education I finally met people who were significantly more capable than me (at least in my chosen specialism). I had to raise my game, and it still wasn’t enough to be top again. In postgraduate study, I met one person who I swear had superhuman powers. I check in on him occasionally to see what he’s become p…

"If you're the smartest person in the room, you're in the wrong room"

The problem is that it's not easy to assess the skills of others. Between impostor syndrome and the Dunning-Kruger effect, it takes a bit of training and knowledge of your environment to sort things out.

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

#332

Post by mavelikara »

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.

Well, I didn’t know this either until I read your comment. Thank you!

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

#333

Post by roydivision »

Learning the guitar.

I spend my professional life learning every day, and usually pick up technical subjects quickly.

The learning process for the guitar and music theory has shown me that you can't learn everything in the same way, different skills require different approaches to learning. Fascinating, frustrating, humbling experience.

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

#334

Post by Karrot_Kream »

ywain wrote: post #325
fifilura wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(Honest question) What is the difference between this microservice architecture that gets a lot of hate here?

I'm not the person you're replying to, but here's my take: even though the two look conceptually similar, Unix programs are just a lot simpler. All programs run on the same machine, they read their input, execute, produce output which is piped to the next program, and terminate. Want to change something? Change one of the programs (or your command line), run the command again, that's it. Microservices are a lot more…

We only think of Unix programs as simple because we have many more abstractions nowadays. But you should compare a Unix program with DOS programs (probably CP/M also but I never wrote those myself) at the time. Poking directly at the hardware, using segmented memory, dealing with interrupts. The idea that a program should be well behaved, should accept things an inputs, should push outputs, and should have a virtual address space are actually huge abstractions over what could just be a block of code run on a spare OS. I'm not saying that microservices are better than monoliths, just that Unix programs aren't as simple as we think they are in a world where we're managing servers like cattle and not like pets.

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

#335

Post by Cyphase »

remoquete wrote: post #308
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.

Thankfully IRL no planes were at risk of falling out of the sky, I assume.

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

#336

Post by chx »

canadiantim wrote: post #220
_ugfj wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For my third shot they were still doing mass vaccinations in Vancouver and the way to get express treatment was by your doctor filling out a stupid form which had a number of conditions but didn't have a way to say "other" so he just gave me a generic doctor's note urging to get vaccinated. On site the nurse asks, ok, why do you need one ahead of your age cohort? I haven't even finished listing the shit I live with w…

Do you have a diagnosis yet? Sounds like it's a hard to categorize condition, likely chronic? Chronic illness can be very difficult to diagnose (correctly), as it's tough to know which symptoms are closer to the root cause when there's so many symptoms. Do you think there's a root cause (or a couple) to your cluster of symptoms? Do you think there's some testing that can help you identify some of the root causes? I'm…

Oh, I got a good neurologist back in Hungary thirty years ago who over two years have sorted what's wrong and set me up and I have been symptom free since 1997 and then I added diabetes T2 on top of a couple years back, all of this is known. That's not the problem, thanks.

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

#337

Post by nottorp »

dusted wrote: post #301
adrianmonk wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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! :)

They're still available but they only seem to make them for professional cleaners (hotels etc) in europe. And they get big and you probably don't want them in your home.

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

#338

Post by Beretta_Vexee »

fifilura wrote: post #285
hiAndrewQuinn wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's cliche, but I really do feel reading the Art of Unix Programming gave me a very good sense early on for how to walk this line carefully. Unix programs are high quality - but they're also, ideally, small , and written with an eye to compositionality with the rest of the ecosystem. The best architecture is in the middle, and often the best first draft is a simple series of pipes. https://www.catb.org/~esr/writings…

(Honest question) What is the difference between this microservice architecture that gets a lot of hate here?

The problem is that they are microservices in name only. Where a unix utility does a few hundred or a thousand lines of C code for its entirety, a microservice will depend on a complex software stack with a web server, an interpreter, an interface with a database, and so on.

It's easy to forget this complexity, but it comes at a cost in terms of performance and, above all, technical debt. The microservice will probably have to be rewritten in 5 years' time because the software stack will be obsolete. Whereas some unix utilities are over 40 years old.

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

#340

Post by HenryBemis »

Cyphase wrote: post #335
remoquete wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> While operating the plant, several commands had to be entered every shift That reminds of the bunker from Lost.

Thankfully IRL no planes were at risk of falling out of the sky, I assume.

Definitely not the ones with the bouncy sound..
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