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

Against Best Practices

arp242.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

201–210 of 218 posts

Re: Against Best Practices

#201

Post by chthonicdaemon »

cafard wrote: post #139
godelski wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is frequently not true. There’s examples all through history of weaker and poorer armies defeating larger ones. From Zulus, to the American Revolution, to the great Emu wars. Surely the birds were not more advanced than men armed with machine guns. But it’s only when the smaller forces can take advantage and leverage what they have better than others. It’s best practices, but what’s best is not universal, it’s b…

The Zulus won a pitched battle or two, but lost the war.

Sure, they (eventually) lost against the British, but they won against many of the southern African tribes before.

Re: Against Best Practices

#202

Post by jdbernard »

Aeolun wrote: post #167
godelski wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is frequently not true. There’s examples all through history of weaker and poorer armies defeating larger ones. From Zulus, to the American Revolution, to the great Emu wars. Surely the birds were not more advanced than men armed with machine guns. But it’s only when the smaller forces can take advantage and leverage what they have better than others. It’s best practices, but what’s best is not universal, it’s b…

> It’s best practices, but what’s best is not universal, it’s best for who, best for when, best for under what circumstances. I’m pretty sure building an organization on a free for all principle is anathema to the idea of an organization.

That's a straw man. The actual argument is about the danger of applying "best practices" uncritically, not about doing away with leadership.

"Do X because it's best practice" is very different than "do X because you were commanded by your rightful authority to do so."

Re: Against Best Practices

#203

Post by trelane »

lmm wrote: post #189
TehShrike wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it is best to strongly reject the idea "best practices will always benefit you". Most best practices that I have been told about were low local maxima at best, and very harmful at worst. If someone quotes a best practice to you and can't cite a convincing "why", you should immediately reject it. It might still be a good idea, but you shouldn't seriously consider it until you hear an actually convincing reason…

> It might still be a good idea, but you shouldn't seriously consider it until you hear an actually convincing reason (not a "just so" explanation that skips several steps). If everyone follows that then every decision will be bikeshedded to death. I think part of the point of the concept of "best practices" is that some ideas should be at least somewhat entrenched, followed by default, and not overturned without goo…

It strikes me that, if a decision can be bikeshedded to death, it's not, generally speaking, an important decision.

Re: Against Best Practices

#204

Post by timrobinson33 »

For me I will always try to seek out best practice as an inspiration - to find out what the most knowledgeable people in this field do.

But if I can't understand why I should do that instead of something else I've thought of, then I'll do it my way thank you.

Re: Against Best Practices

#206

Post by agentultra »

TehShrike wrote: post #74
agentultra wrote: post #55

I think the rejection is too strong in this article. The idea of, “best practices,” comes from an established Body of Knowledge . There is one published for software development called the SoftWare Engineering Body of Knowledge or SWEBOK; published by the IEEE. The author seems to be arguing for nuance: that these “laws,” require context and shouldn’t be applied blindly. I agree. However they shouldn’t be rejected ou…

I think it is best to strongly reject the idea "best practices will always benefit you". Most best practices that I have been told about were low local maxima at best, and very harmful at worst. If someone quotes a best practice to you and can't cite a convincing "why", you should immediately reject it. It might still be a good idea, but you shouldn't seriously consider it until you hear an actually convincing reason…

I definitely sympathize with the thrust of the article. I think the reality is somewhere in the middle: best practices are useful short-cuts and people aren't always idiots for suggesting them. I've worked with folks who insist on Postel's law despite security research in recent years that suggest parsers should be strict to prevent langsec attacks, for example. In those cases I would refute leniency...

Although I also do work in fintech and well... card payment systems are messy. The legal framework covers liability for when actors send bad data but your system still has to parse/process/accept those messages. So you need some leniency.

It does drive me up the wall sometimes when people will hand-wave away details and cite maxims or best-practices... but those are usually situations where the details matter a great deal: security, safety, liveness, etc. People generally have the best intentions in these scenarios and I don't fault them for having different experience/knowledge/wisdom that lead them to different conclusions than I do. They're not idiots for suggesting best practices... it's just a nuisance.

That's what I mean about the rejection being too strong. It should be considered that best practices are often useful and helpful. We don't have to re-develop our intuitions from first principles on every project. It would be tedious to do so. But a healthy dose of skepticism should be used... especially when it comes to Postel's Law which has some decent research to suggest avoiding it.

Re: Against Best Practices

#207

Post by godelski »

c22 wrote: post #142
godelski wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No army has ever conquered a country Napoleon and his army would like to have a word with you… I get the analogy but I think it can be made a lot better, which will decrease people who dismiss it because they got lost in where the wording doesn’t make sense. I’m pretty confident most would agree that country A conquered country B if country B was nothing but fire and rubble. It’s pretty common usage actually. Also,…

The US president, a civilian, is in command of the US military. This is, in fact, the inverse of a country being run by its military.

  >> Also, there’s plenty of examples of countries ruled by militaries. Even the US president is the head of the military
Maybe I should have reversed the order of these two. I didn't intend to use the US as an example of a country ruled by a military but rather that military is integral and connected directly to the top.

Re: Against Best Practices

#208

Post by Izkata »

lkrubner wrote: post #80

Dan Morena, CTO at Upright.com, made the point that every startup was unique and therefore every startup had to find out what was best for it, while ignoring whatever was considered "best practice." I wrote what he told me here: https://respectfulleadership.substack.com/p/dan-morena-is-a-... My summary of his idea: No army has ever conquered a country. An army conquers this muddy ditch over here, that open wheat fiel…

I think the word you're looking for is "nation", not "country". A country is the land area and would be conquered in that example, while a nation is the more abstract entity made of the people. It's why it makes sense to talk about countries after the government falls, or nations without a country.

Re: Against Best Practices

#209

Post by legulere »

> “use single point of exit”, and that kind of absolute insane bollocks

As always it's a matter of context. If you have a low level language like C without any automatic cleanup having an out label to goto which cleans up in all cases makes a lot of sense.

There's always some reasoning behind those rules, sadly rarely talked about directly. You should check if that reasoning applies to you and weigh the benefits against the costs. A lot of time it's just doing what everyone else is doing, which is a very fine reason, as it makes onboarding new developers easier.

Re: Against Best Practices

#210

Post by michael1999 »

agentultra wrote: post #137
michael1999 wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like SWEBOK, but I don't understand your point. SWEBOK seems the opposite of that. A body of knowledge is not at all the same thing as a best practice. The only unapologetic best practice in SWEBOK is that professionals should be familiar with every topic in SWEBOK. Definitely not that you _should_ do everything in the book. The book is quite sophisticated in this. It explicitly separate the technical knowledge fro…

> I don't understand your point In my view best practices emerge from a body of knowledge (or sometimes from the practice and wisdom of others that haven't been documented/accepted/etc yet) and are "shortcuts." I'm not defending Postel's Law; I agree that, after years of practice and research, it leads to security issues and surprises. However, the point is that these kinds of principles don't arise out of people's h…

Sure. Best practices develop by choosing practices to match your context out of a defined body of knowledge.

But SWEBOK is very clear that "best practices" are context specific - they are radically different forces and solutions in video games as compared to chemical engineering control systems. There's no such thing as a "best practice" absent a context. The footnotes in SWEBOK point off in a million directions saying "go look over there for best practices for YOUR context".

Post reply on HN