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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?

#451

Post by krispyfi »

e4325f wrote: post #385
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…

I was once asked about Slack, fortunately they were already a colleague

J. R. "Bob" Dobbs?

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

#452

Post by shafyy »

margorczynski wrote: post #444
shafyy wrote: post #418

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's a story for you: I was born and raised in Switzerland, but I live in Germany now. When I first moved here, I was working as a freelancer and needed to register as a sole entrepreneur (Einzelunternehmen, one of the legal entity forms here). Now, there are several types of taxes you pay in Germany based on your income. One of them is the income tax, the other is called Gewerbesteuer (maybe best translated as "co…

Yeah, Germany is kind of a bureaucratic hellhole. And from what I know France is even worse. As for formal education - I've seen dozens of people with an engineering diploma who barely can write a FizzBuzz, so it is not the best indicator and mostly people don't look at it when it comes to recruitment aside from big corps. Although that kinda changed lately as junior positions started evaporating and without experien…

Yeah. I also never had problems getting a job or similar because of my non-CS degree.

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

#453

Post by ordu »

nottorp wrote: post #343
atomicnumber3 wrote: post #13

When I was about 3 months into my programming career I performed a minor refactor to some code. Unfortunately, the program was difficult to test (no unit tests) and very important, and difficult to verify correctness of output as well. (As in, you can't just look at it and say "yeah that's numbers lgtm"). Also unfortunately the previous author had not been very consistent in their programming style, so there was a lo…

Did that when I was younger, but with my own code :) There was an if that didn't need brackets when I wrote it. 6 months later it needed more stuff on a branch but i was tired and in a hurry so I didn't notice adding extra lines needs brackets. New code compiled but wasn't part of the if. Turned a 5 minute fix into 2 days. Of course, all my ifs have had brackets on both sides since then.

It is the thing I love about emacs, it autoindents everything, so if you got brackets/braces/parenthesis wrong you see something you don't expect. But obligatory braces work too.

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

#454

Post by jnsie »

bionsystem wrote: post #274
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 had some success trading a long/short stock portfolio, but on longer time periods than day trading (holding positions from few weeks to few months). The fun lasted almost 3 years. Then I shorted META from 300 to 100 and felt on top of the world, it was after shorting a bunch of other "covid success stories" like zoom, moderna, carvana, and making 50%+ return on each in a reasonnably concentrated portfolio. The rest…

> We are talking small numbers (maybe losing 15k in total) but an amazing amount of time and energy spent doing all this which generated a lot of stress.

This was roughly my experience too. Stopping after the above trade meant my total losses were not huge (relatively speaking; maybe $2000) but I put an incredible amount of effort into it and the stress was huge. I don't fully regret it because, frankly, it was very exciting, I had a lot of fun and it was extremely interesting trying to predict the ebb and flow of the market and the psychology behind moves.

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

#455

Post by weebull »

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?

Composability.

This does not mean "it's a small component in a dedicated pipeline". It means "this is a component that's useful in many pipelines".

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

#456

Post by throwup238 »

lukas099 wrote: post #435
itronitron wrote: post #428

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To extend that further, most professional painters think of themselves as sanders.

Why?

It’s usually more than 80% of the work. Painting something is really fast with modern sprayers but sanding off the old layer is still a lot of elbow grease, even when you have sand blasters.

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

#457

Post by Loughla »

qprofyeh wrote: post #445

Falling out of favor with ceo/cofounders/ex. Those moments were a punch to the face.

I'm dealing with this right now. New institutional leadership at the most executive level. This person believes

a) if you're not moving up you should be moved out;

b) there is zero value in the historical operations of any department; and

c) the only way to tell if someone is a good employee is whether or not his gut tells him he likes them.

These are three things I disagree with vehemently. He has no use for me.

It has been difficult, to say the least, to work with this person. If it weren't for the layers between he and I, he would've fired me by now.

This is a place I have never been. Ever. And it's massively frustrating. No amount of ability or intelligence can overcome this man's gut instinct. And he's in charge now.

I have zero idea what to do here. I have never worked with someone who so explicitly wants his employees to kiss his ass (HR literally said to kiss his ass when I went to them for guidance on how to improve myself to fix this situation).

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

#458

Post by Loughla »

qup wrote: post #39

I often learn how to use something well that I've been using my whole life. A ratchet strap was a good example--you can use it without understanding how to use it well. One video (essential craftsman) fixed that for me. I think the most humbling for me is seeing a real pro use something you use a lot, like a kitchen knife.

How were you using ratchet straps wrong?

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

#459

Post by mlrtime »

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…

Not as good as your story, but here's mine:

First job out of school, fresh ECE degree in my back pocket. I was hired to be a Unix Administrator (SunOS, AIX, Linux). This was a AS/400 shop and nobody knew Linux, the last guy just left.

They show me a Linux terminal that was just booting to a 'LI' and asked me to fix it. I had never fixed a lilo issue at the time and my skip manager, a as/400 guru figured it out by reading the docs.

I felt like an imposter and an idiot in on day. But I learned that I didn't know sh*t and my learning was just beginning.

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

#460

Post by Loughla »

throwawayUS9 wrote: post #264

That in the US, and if you are driving around a neighborhood, the size/tallness of the trees tell how old the neighborhood is (without really looking into any ads in an online portal)

Or how recently they have experienced a natural disaster like a flood or tornado.
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