Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Three ways to solve problems

andreasfragner.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–27 of 27 posts

Re: Three ways to solve problems

#21

Post by yapyap »

1970-01-01 wrote: post #11

There's a 4th way, but it works least often. Maybe Method 2.5 fits better: Wait for the problem to fix itself to your level of risk. Ex: This road is blocked. I have a good news it won't be blocked in X days/months/years. Let's just wait until it's a little better for us to travel down and do something else for a just little while. It's a hybrid between waiting for the path to open up for everyone and forcing your wa…

That 4th way is a nicely realistic but very toxic (in my experience) way to solve problems.

Not when it’s applicable in the situation but if you use it in your toolbox it’s very easy to overapply, if you’re a hammer everything looks like a nail style.

Use it critically

Re: Three ways to solve problems

#22

Post by bicepjai »

1970-01-01 wrote: post #11

There's a 4th way, but it works least often. Maybe Method 2.5 fits better: Wait for the problem to fix itself to your level of risk. Ex: This road is blocked. I have a good news it won't be blocked in X days/months/years. Let's just wait until it's a little better for us to travel down and do something else for a just little while. It's a hybrid between waiting for the path to open up for everyone and forcing your wa…

My experience in trying to build AI tools has always been the 4th way :) Let’s build a coding agent in 2022, procrastination takes over, and then came along Aider, Cursor, Roo, and others. Same with AI observability tools. Wait just enough time to see the tools built themselves.

Re: Three ways to solve problems

#23

Post by nubg »

treetalker wrote: post #19
n3t wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder what a specific example of this approach would be.

I'm intrigued and would appreciate further examples/explanations too.

It's an interesting approach.

To try to come up with an example, let's say we set as our goal to completely automate a process X, which consists of 10 subprocesses. Let's say we fairly quickly automated steps 1-9, but the 10th is tricky.

But we now realize the 10th step was only really necessary for certain edge cases, which we now realize we are fine not handling. So we "if" them away and now have a process that is 100% automated, even though it is different from what we originally wanted to achieve.

Re: Three ways to solve problems

#27

Post by treetalker »

nubg wrote: post #23
treetalker wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm intrigued and would appreciate further examples/explanations too.

It's an interesting approach. To try to come up with an example, let's say we set as our goal to completely automate a process X, which consists of 10 subprocesses. Let's say we fairly quickly automated steps 1-9, but the 10th is tricky. But we now realize the 10th step was only really necessary for certain edge cases, which we now realize we are fine not handling. So we "if" them away and now have a process that is…

Thanks for responding!

Perhaps a bit of the magic and allure disappears by pulling back the curtain: it sounds like an instance of analyzing and breaking down the problem into smaller ones; solving those pieces as you go along; further breaking them down as necessary; and tossing aside the nuts that are too tough to crack.

Post reply on HN