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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?

#371

Post by eru »

yen223 wrote: post #131
massysett wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

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

Not necessarily. Person A might beat B at video games, too. Just spending time doesn't necessarily make you good at something.

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

#372

Post by eru »

DoreenMichele wrote: post #141

I was a full-time mom and military wife when my kids were little. We moved into a 2 bedroom, 50 year old duplex at a new duty station and there was a low-ceiling basement that was mostly consumed by a giant boiler but there was one low-ceiling room down there and we made it a playroom because our two kids were sharing a really tiny bedroom. So we set up a TV down there and it's a rental so we don't want to drill hole…

Well, at least you can feel proud of the kid!

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

#373

Post by Sander_Marechal »

jasonkester wrote: post #275

I lived in Pamplona, Spain for a year, back before my Spanish was particularly good. It was a pretty amazing place, with all its narrow cobbled alleys and small shops. They had a particular style of bread in a few of the shops, kind of a rustic baguette with pointy ends, that I never could find the name of. I'd always have to point and say "that one", which always felt awkward. Worse, my Spanish wasn't yet good enoug…

For anyone else as dense as me, I had to look this up. "Pan de Ayer" means "Yesterday's bread". Good story OP :-)

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

#374

Post by sevnin »

ozim wrote: post #292
icelancer wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No one wants to be a "programmer." They'd rather be called "engineers." With none of the licensure, mandatory education, and so forth. But the world needs programmers and technicians for most of the work we have to do. I do comparably little "engineering" and the little I have done that qualifies for such a statement I recall. Majority of the work is programming and technician work. Nothing wrong with that.

I call myself an engineer- but the way I understand it is that I still have to know when to use a hammer like simply copy paste code and not some complex solution.

The problem in software is that very frequently you dont have a real hammer. You have hundred amalgamations of swiss army knives that do everything. Like what is the hammer when you want to add some nice dynamic content to a website? Is it just javascript or maybe react?, Angular?, Svelte? Or another example: you want to code a command line app, what language is a hammer here?: C++?, Go?, Bash?, Python?

This analogy falls apart the moment you apply it to anything in software.

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

#375

Post by eru »

vasco wrote: post #349
kortilla wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“It’s a guy browsing the internet a bit” can be game over from a security perspective. Some machines should never execute code from public web pages, full stop. So it is a philosophical question of why the restrictions were in place in this scenario. If it was “employee productivity”, then sure, who cares. If it was an IRS computer with thousands of people’s tax returns on disk and access to millions more, then repor…

If he was the most senior sysadmin it's already his responsibility to keep things safe anyway, so if you trust him for all the rest of the infra you can trust him for a proxy.

I'm not so sure.

I can imagine trusting someone to set up (and even enforce) eg an alcohol policy, but still be prone to alcohol abuse themselves.

Weak wills are a thing. Or people thinking they are smarter than the protocols that apply to the masses.

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

#376

Post by eru »

techproblems wrote: post #256
tempie2024 wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is a hard one. Best to report it I think.. but it is not clear cut in general. There would be times when going against your employer by blowing the whistle or covering up is the more moral thing to do. Deciding where that line is not simple and there is no guide.

I can't agree. By far the biggest lesson that you can verify even on this thread, is that the biggest tech problems are actually people problems. Even things like tech debt are all over the place framed as project/people management rather than tech stuff at its fundamentals. The comment already established the senior sysadmin is generally a valuable person who does a lot to flourish the company. Going out of the way…

> By far the biggest lesson that you can verify even on this thread, is that the biggest tech problems are actually people problems.

The opposite lesson is also useful: sometimes you can turn people problems into tech problems, and that's how you can 'solve' them.

Slightly hypothetical scenario: assume your team keeps all the source code on a shared drive. You are supposed to coordinate with your coworkers before touching any code. Sometimes that goes wrong, and looks like a people problem.

If you introduce eg git and automated-tests-before-merging, you can turn that into a technical problem.

My thesis is that organisations (and people in those organisations) can only solve so many people problems. If you lighten the load by automating some of the problems into tech problems, you have more levity on the remaining people problems.

(This happy state of affairs isn't always possible. And sometimes it can backfire.)

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

#378

Post by camgunz »

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?

Microservices require Kafka (or a Kafka equivalent)

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

#379

Post by mlry »

dizhn wrote: post #207
perihelions wrote: post #7

I took my Thinkpad to a repair shop because its charging port was damaged. A very stoic human pointed out to me it has *two* identical ones, USB-C type, right next to each other.

I am confused. Does only one of them support charging? (I've got one where both can charge, though they don't look the same because one is also thunderbolt)

I think this is their point given this threads question for a humbling learning moment. Both ports support charging but it took someone from outside to get OPs fixed mind off their habitual notion that only a specific port could charge. They did not even try that other port.

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

#380

Post by sevnin »

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?

That's a great question. Some might say it's because of the network - that makes microservices messy and so on. But I dont think so, from what I remember plan9 (the os, successor of unix), Rob Pike wanted to make it so that there is no difference between an object being on the network or outside the network. In unix philosophy, things have the same interface, it's easy to communicate. For microservices it would be REST api which is unique to network things. I honestly see a direct link between these ideas. Unix here is projecting a much nicer, simpler image but nonetheless they seem to overlap a lot. The result in both cases seems to be a hard to debug network of small utilities working together. The saving grace for unix is that you are mostly using stable tools (like ls, cat), everything is on your system so - you don't get to experience the pain of debugging 5 different half-working tools.
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