Nobody knows how the whole system works • Hacker News Board

Re: Nobody knows how the whole system works

#171

Post by its_magic » Mon, Feb 09, 2026, 9:33 PM UTC

robocat wrote: post #148

lazystar wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Granted one person can't know/do everything, watch me try, at least. > but large companies in particular seem allergic to granting you any visibility whatsoever. It's particularly annoying If the blind spot is directly causing customer pain, find metrics that demonstrate the impact. If it ends up driving away your customers, then your company is securing itself to death.

> customer pain > driving away your customers > company death You are implying efficient market theory, which is bunk. Example: Our banks have endless painful papercuts yet most of us don't change banks just because of one pain. We each respond to our own complex of costs and benefits (or risks versus rewards). Second example: I use an iPhone because I judge it to be more secure yet I'm constantly fighting the same b…

> Example: Our banks have endless painful papercuts yet most of us don't change banks just because of one pain.

One bank pissed me off due to an extremely dishonest thing they did. So I overdrafted the account to the max ($500) and left them the bill.

(Not the first time I've done something like that to someone who deserved it. I've done much, much more in some cases. Endless painful papercuts? Nope, I do not accept that.)

They weren't happy about this. I think they hit "my" "credit" with that for years. I never noticed, as I don't borrow money; the machinations of these "credit reporting" agencies are beneath my concern. They have no credit in my eyes. I don't consort with crooks, I just punish them.

> Second example: I use an iPhone because I judge it to be more secure yet I'm constantly fighting the same bugs and misfeatures that seem to never get fixed/improved.

I haven't had a phone in decades at this point. Don't want one. I refused to be tracked, monitored, or abused by anyone. And no, I sure don't give a single fuck about any of the many people (and there have been MANY) who have tried their best to shame, cajole, insult, ridicule, harass, intimidate, or bully me into getting a phone. Fuck em all.

> Your chain of reasoning is broken? Or is it your model of the world?

Maybe it's you who's broken. Why do you accept slavery? Just to fit in?

Since you're hardly the only one with a similar way of thinking, maybe we could say it's the entire society that's broken.

I simply do not tolerate the things that you tolerate.

Re: Nobody knows how the whole system works

#172

Post by agumonkey » Mon, Feb 09, 2026, 9:35 PM UTC

wrs wrote: post #161

agumonkey wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's various degrees of understanding, for instance as a web dev, you know the browser, the osi network stack.. (in theory, there are a lot of tweaks) then maybe the electronics.. but the radio / wireless part is another world in itself with a totally different mindset (analog waves) which make the rabbithole way too long (and wide.. radio is a big world on its own)

Well, pixels on a screen are a totally different mindset from network protocols or program control flow, but nobody’s surprised when one person can work within all of those. Brains are big. So yeah, it’s just a matter of degree. (It’s the T-shaped vs I-shaped career thing.)

at least to me, I could learn most layers in a computer without choking completely. whenever i tried reading radio engineering i was drowning right away

Re: Nobody knows how the whole system works

#173

Post by matthewkayin » Mon, Feb 09, 2026, 9:52 PM UTC

zen4ttitude wrote: post #157

rorylaitila wrote: post #71

There are many layers to this. But there is one style of programming that concerns me. Where you neither understand the layer above you (why the product exists and what the goal of the system is) nor the layer below (how to actually implement the behavior). In the past, many developers barely understood the business case, but at least they understood how to translate into code, and could put backpressure on the busin…

You sit on the arbitrating layer. It sounds like you have some programming experience as you miss looking at the code. I did check a lot of code and got tired of how perfect it were, generated by AI. Latest Claude is insane, does not even make errors. You still have to guide it and it will occasionally go astray and make rookie mistakes. If you extrapolate to 6 months down the road, one Claude API = a team of 10 prog…

> Latest Claude is insane, does not even make errors. You still have to guide it and it will occasionally go astray and make rookie mistakes.

I swear, do you people even hear yourselves?

Re: Nobody knows how the whole system works

#174

Post by observationist » Mon, Feb 09, 2026, 9:54 PM UTC

rorylaitila wrote: post #71

There are many layers to this. But there is one style of programming that concerns me. Where you neither understand the layer above you (why the product exists and what the goal of the system is) nor the layer below (how to actually implement the behavior). In the past, many developers barely understood the business case, but at least they understood how to translate into code, and could put backpressure on the busin…

Chesterton's steamroller, lol.

Re: Nobody knows how the whole system works

#175

Post by AceJohnny2 » Mon, Feb 09, 2026, 10:02 PM UTC

Anecdotally, the reason my career is in embedded software is that I kept wanting to know how the (software) system works, and embedded is as deep as you can get without changing disciplines altogether.

The cost is you lose those layers of abstractions you get at the higher software levels, and there's only so much complexity I can handle.

(the funny part is that even HW registers and stuff are just an API that the hardware chooses to expose. As Alan Kay said: "Hardware is really just software crystallized early")

Re: Nobody knows how the whole system works

#176

Post by krab » Mon, Feb 09, 2026, 10:06 PM UTC

idiotsecant wrote: post #63

ahnick wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most people have no idea how to hunt, make a fire, or grow food. If all grocery stores and restaurants run out of food for a long enough time people will starve. This isn't a problem in practice though, because there are so many grocery stores and restaurants and supply chains source from multiple areas that the redundant and decentralized nature makes it not a problem. Thus it is the same with making your own food.…

Ok, poof. Now everyone knows how to hunt, farm, and cook. What problem does this solve? In the event of breakdown of society there is nowhere near enough game or arable land near, for example, New York City to prevent mass starvation if the supply chain breaks down totally. This is a common prepper trope, but it doesn't make any sense. The actual valuable skill is trade connections and community. A group of people yo…

> This is a common prepper trope, but it doesn't make any sense.

In case the supply chain breaks, preppers don't want to be the ones that starve. They don't claim they can prevent mass starvation.

(Very off topic from the article)

Re: Nobody knows how the whole system works

#177

Post by ebhn » Mon, Feb 09, 2026, 10:26 PM UTC

ragall wrote: post #164

planb wrote: post #90

This article is about people using abstractions without knowing how they work. This is fine. This is how progress is made. But someone designed the abstraction (e.g. the Wifi driver, the processor, the transistor), and they made sure it works and provides an interface to the layers above. Now you could say a piece of software completely written by a coding agent is just another abstraction, but the article does not r…

> Now you could say a piece of software completely written by a coding agent is just another abstraction You're almost there. The current code-generating LLMs will be a dead end because it takes more time to thoroughly review a piece of code than to generate it, especially because LLM code is needlessly verbose. The solution is to abandon general-purpose languages and start encapsulating the abstraction behind a DSL,…

I like this direction, but I worry about developers involvement in the design of the DSL becoming the new bottleneck with the same problems. The code which becomes the guardrails cannot just be generated slop, it should be thoroughly designed and understood imo

Re: Nobody knows how the whole system works

#178

Post by robocat » Mon, Feb 09, 2026, 10:34 PM UTC

its_magic wrote: post #171

robocat wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> customer pain > driving away your customers > company death You are implying efficient market theory, which is bunk. Example: Our banks have endless painful papercuts yet most of us don't change banks just because of one pain. We each respond to our own complex of costs and benefits (or risks versus rewards). Second example: I use an iPhone because I judge it to be more secure yet I'm constantly fighting the same b…

> Example: Our banks have endless painful papercuts yet most of us don't change banks just because of one pain. One bank pissed me off due to an extremely dishonest thing they did. So I overdrafted the account to the max ($500) and left them the bill. (Not the first time I've done something like that to someone who deserved it. I've done much, much more in some cases. Endless painful papercuts? Nope, I do not accept…

> I overdrafted the account to the max ($500) and left them the bill

I think theft is a poor answer - although most society accepts your rationalisation when dealing with government or big business.

Even worse is that you can't know what it may cost you in the future. My friend couldn't open a business account the other day. After many phone calls he was lucky enough to find someone that told him it was because he left that bank with an account $67 overdrawn when he was younger. That's in New Zealand: I strongly suspect he never would have found out the reason he was denied in many countries[1]. His only recourse was to use a more expensive provider (maybe $600 per year).

Please don't assume I am tolerant of abuse. I vindictively avoid some brands (and even all products from some countries).

I just often judge that my changing to a different service has costs I would rather avoid so I stick with a known evil (I'm good at finding workarounds for many niggles).

I also accept annoying papercuts because I believe all services have imperfection and flaws. Too many people count costs without balance.

What is this perfect bank you have discovered without papercuts?

[1] https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/debanking-and-debunki...

Re: Nobody knows how the whole system works

#179

Post by order-matters » Mon, Feb 09, 2026, 10:40 PM UTC

ragall wrote: post #164

planb wrote: post #90

This article is about people using abstractions without knowing how they work. This is fine. This is how progress is made. But someone designed the abstraction (e.g. the Wifi driver, the processor, the transistor), and they made sure it works and provides an interface to the layers above. Now you could say a piece of software completely written by a coding agent is just another abstraction, but the article does not r…

> Now you could say a piece of software completely written by a coding agent is just another abstraction You're almost there. The current code-generating LLMs will be a dead end because it takes more time to thoroughly review a piece of code than to generate it, especially because LLM code is needlessly verbose. The solution is to abandon general-purpose languages and start encapsulating the abstraction behind a DSL,…

I agree. Additionally, a company can own and update a business language of their own design at their own pace and need. Then they can use AI to translate from their controlled business language to the DSL needed (translation being an area it actually does well). In this way the LLM would only ever be going from General -> specific, which should keep it on the rails, and the business can keep its business logic stored

Now that said, there is still the actual engineering problem of leveraging the capabilities of the underlying technology. For example, being able to map your 4 core program to a 16 core system and have it work is one thing, actually utilizing 16 cores is another. Extend to all technological advancements

Re: Nobody knows how the whole system works

#180

Post by hn_acc1 » Mon, Feb 09, 2026, 10:44 PM UTC

sgarland wrote: post #89

PandaStyle wrote: post #13

Perhaps a dose of pragmatism is needed here? I am no CS major, nor do I fully understand the inner workings of a computer beyond "we tricked a rock into thinking by shocking it." I'd love to better understand it, and I hope that through my journey of working with computers, i'll better learn about these underlying concepts registers, bus's, memory, assembly etc Practically however, I write scripts that solve real wor…

Nearly every time I attempt to tell people how much understanding fundamentals matters, it’s dismissed as being unnecessary knowledge. I can’t make anyone want to know how things work, and it’s getting tiring being continuously told “no” when I ask.

My daughter who is studying CS (unexpectedly) actually listens most of the time. Which is surprising. But then she tells me her classmates used AI to cheat on assignments so much that the prof had to change the weighting of the assignments to be 0.

I just don't get paying to "learn", and then using AI avoid learning.