I don’t belong in tech • Hacker News Board

Re: I don’t belong in tech

#201

Post by Illniyar » Sun, Nov 27, 2016, 10:43 AM UTC

chris_wot wrote: post #192

Illniyar wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Heh. We had tons of double billing from payment processors, we never could get a straight answer from the gateway as to why it happened. Most of them came from.a gateway called CyberSource. Also, lots of customers have weird banks where they see both an authorization (I.e. hold) and the actual capture, and they mistake it for two captures. Usually it helps to educate them about what is an authorization.

Man, a bank that doesn't know the difference is a bank I'd be withdrawing my funds from!

The bank knows the difference, the reports they send out to customers (or maybe what the customer's see on the site) don't make the distinction clear enough.

Most banks don't even bother showing the customer authorizations of any kind.

Re: I don’t belong in tech

#202

Post by chongli » Sun, Nov 27, 2016, 4:14 PM UTC

dcole2929 wrote: post #130

chris_wot wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not entirely sure that she's right in tarring the whole industry with the same brush. Taking a bug out to tea is fantastic, because it really is about understanding the problem. But she conflates maintenance coding and program writing. There is a lot of half-baked software out there, but to say that this isn't like any other industry - like journalism - is really patently absurd. Despite best intentions, journali…

I think the difference is in how the two industries she are comparing here fundamentally treat mistakes. In journalism, you might not get fired immediately for a mistake like that but certainly you're going to get reprimanded and told how unacceptable that is. Your company is absolutely going to run a correction at the first opportunity they get. Any mistake is treated as a major embarrassment by staff of a respectab…

You should try reading science journalism. It's absolutely riddled with errors and oversimplifications that never get corrected!

Moreover, sure NPR might fire you for repeatedly using incorrect numbers for which they then have to publish retractions but that doesn't stop you from using essentially correct statistics in highly misleading ways, a sin all major media sources are guilty of.

Re: I don’t belong in tech

#203

Post by DannyBee » Mon, Nov 28, 2016, 4:37 AM UTC

user5994461 wrote: post #85

rokhayakebe wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Instead, you sat on a mountain and meditated upon your code, until you understood it well enough to fix the problem and try again. :)

And it was the most productive time of your life. Never, at any point in your meditation or mountain ascension, did you introduce a single bug or provoked any issue to any user =)

Even though you are being sarcastic, certainly you realize things like defensive programming were much more heavily used in such environments.

So yeah, it was entirely possible they didn't introduce more bugs.

Now people just expect to crash often and make it up in volume.

They can of course, which is precisely the problem the original author has: in a ton of contexts, fast and able to hack up things is more sellable than understanding problems.

(and FWIW, i actually haven't thought hard enough about it to have an opinion whether the current status is better or worse, i'm just explaining why it's not necessarily about cost to develop).

Re: I don’t belong in tech

#204

Post by sotojuan » Tue, Nov 29, 2016, 2:42 PM UTC

dunkelheit wrote: post #7

Maybe she should quit doing user-facing stuff and try getting into systems programming for a change. Or some other area where sloppy solutions lead to tangible reduction of business value and thus are not tolerated. Tech is big, no need to quit all of it.

Just more and more reasons to quit web dev, huh?

Re: I don’t belong in tech

#205

Post by hprotagonist » Tue, Nov 29, 2016, 10:54 PM UTC

jhanschoo wrote: post #190

nathan_f77 wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, well that's not really what "Doctor of Philosophy" means. It comes from the same Greek word, which means "love of wisdom", but it's unrelated the field of philosophy. I also think the philosophy of computer science is very interesting, though. I just saw that Oxford offers a course that combines computer science and philosophy: https://www.ox.ac.uk/admissions/undergraduate/courses-listin...

Actually, whereas the word literally means that, the use of the word philosophy to mean a disciplined investigation into questions actually predates even Plato's Academy. The reason why academic titles have the word philosophy in them is because modern investigations have developed from the philosophical tradition. For example, philosophers may have a question, "what is value?", or "what is the nature of the world?",…

it also has to do with the fact that the title of the degree predates the differentiation of many of the sciences. Newton, for example, would not have described himself as a physicist because that word didn't yet exist. (it was first coined, per the OED, in 1840.) He was a natural philosopher, which meant he thought Aristotle could be wrong and you could prove that.