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

Stop Telling Everyone What You Do for a Living

wsj.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

241–249 of 249 posts

Re: Stop Telling Everyone What You Do for a Living

#241

Post by ttymck »

impendia wrote: post #107
TRiG_Ireland wrote: post #67

A lot of people in the comments are suggesting alternative small talk, like "tell me what you did this weekend" or "tell me what you're about (?!)". I don't understand the need for any of that. You're meeting in some social environment: talk about that. If it's a dinner, talk about the food, or the host. If someone has just given a speech, talk about that. If you're at a sporting event, or a mediaeval reenactment eve…

I moved from San Francisco, where it was common to ask people "wnat do you do?", to South Carolina, where it's considered a little bit rude. For me, it was a painful transition; I no longer find it easy to get into enjoyable conversations with new people. I've always found it difficult to talk about, e.g. food. "Isn't this food great?" "Yeah, it's delicious"! Similarly with the weather, or any other conversation wher…

> "Isn't this food great?" "Yeah, it's delicious"!

To me, that is not small talk. It's nothing: it's filler sounds made to break silence.

Small talk would be: "what did you think of the food? I've never had potatoes cooked that way before."

Give the other person something to go on, at least.

Re: Stop Telling Everyone What You Do for a Living

#242

Post by verelo »

throwaway290 wrote: post #201
jraph wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't see a point of any questions like that it's a discussion starter. The point is to start the discussion. It often works. > Asking these is always intrusive, you might not think so if you are fully comfortable talking about what you do or where you're from etc, but that's not all people. Ok, that's another argument than "it's lazy". I can see it, especially when people are unemployed, they often feel ashamed.…

> it's a discussion starter Anything can be a discussion starter, even "weather is nice", and a lot of it is less privileged/entitled/profiling/inquisitive sounding. Actually, "what do you do" is as often a non-starter for me if the person tells me about something I am not interested in and it sucks to have to feign interest. It's much better to ask something pertaining to a shared interest. If you actually pay atten…

I think the reason i say it’s lazy is because I often end up feeling like they didn’t care, they just asked to fill the void. I’d love to have a real conversation about anything really. Ask me about my favourite place to eat, what my opinion is on a new product on the market, tell me about a book you’re reading and why it’s interesting…all works for me. The what do you do thing, it’s loaded with other elements; who makes more, who do you know, should i respect you. I could brag pretty hard if that’s the game we are playing, but honestly for new authentic connections, I’d like to stay away from that stuff at least for a while. It’s unavoidable, it’ll come up, but i love trying hard to delay it.

Re: Stop Telling Everyone What You Do for a Living

#243

Post by astrange »

8jef wrote: post #71
jiggawatts wrote: post #43

[flagged]

> Cavemen who weren't curious about the capabilities and fitness of other men in their group didn't get to pass on their genes to us. Source please.

As usual for evo psych, this is clearly just made up, since not every country asks each other what their job is. (America does, I think China might, but other first world countries don't.)

Re: Stop Telling Everyone What You Do for a Living

#244

Post by jraph »

CoastalCoder wrote: post #219
jraph wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, I think the parent commenter is aware this is not the fault of the one who asked. Though when doing a PhD, it's a worthy goal to be able do give a quick description. It also forces you to think about the goal / meaning of your work. Some topics are more easily summarized, but still. We do science for people, it's only fair to be able to present them your work more or less roughly. I had something for peop…

Well now I'm interested. Want to share more details?

:-)

Well, gladly!

I worked on combining Interactive Debugging with Runtime Verification (and we called it Interactive Runtime Verification). Interactive debugging is the usual step by step debugging you know, offered by your standard IDE or debugger like GDB.

Runtime Verification evaluates properties from a stream of events, the program execution being usually seen as a sequence of events (there are ways to represent concurrency / parallel executions too, a bit more complicated than a mere sequence in this case).

GDB offers a comprehensive Python interface [1] that lets you add breakpoints, watchpoints and catchpoints to inspect what's going on during the execution, and you decide whether to suspend the execution on conditions you evaluate. In our cases, the conditions are the runtime verification properties. See this like conditional breakpoints on steroids.

For instance, take a program that manipulates a queue. One property you don't want to break is "the program never remove an element from an empty list". Another one is "the program never pushes elements to an already full list". To evaluate these properties, you describe the property in terms of parameterized calls to functions new_list(n), push() and pop(). In a C program, the calls could "succeed", the execution continues but with a memory corruption. Which could be hard to detect. So instead, you have this runtime verification stop the execution for you at the point where the bug happens, instead of the likely crash.

So we implemented this idea, with features like checkpointing (thanks to the (limited) native experimental GDB checkpointing feature, or CRIU (Checkpoint and Restore in Userspace - the thing behind Docker container checkpointing and migration) [2], which does this very well) as a Python extension to GDB. This implementation theoretically supported any language supported by GDB, including C and C++.

Building on this implementation, we made a second version that supported distributed programs, and also supported Java programs. The debugging capabilities of the JVM are awesome / endless.

These implementations allowed benchmarking. Unfortunately, we focused on benchmarking the performance of the instrumentation, but what would have been very useful is to validate the method itself with human studies. This PhD should have been at the edge between computer science and human studies. It's not. Instead, it's very theoretical, with some formalism trying to define an interactively verified execution, and doing proofs that the instrumentation does not affect the execution.

Sounds amazing? What's the catch? Finding actual properties that relate to day to day bugs is hard. When developing a program, specifications are not given as LTL properties by the client, it's more like "I need this, be creative", and it's team work, and more often than not bugs are created by misunderstandings, moving targets, not having the full context when making changes, unforeseen interaction between more or less complex, more or less supposedly unrelated stuff, etc. Those can probably be seen as formal property violations but that's probably a bit far fetched. I guess a bunch of researchers loving formalism or performance evaluation having no clue about software development were not going to go very far in this. Still, it's a topic probably worth researching nonetheless.

See:

- the git repository of the implementation (it's free software) [3]

- the first "serious" paper presenting the idea [4]

- the PhD manuscript if you like verbosity. It's also the only place where we speak about the distributed version, I could not manage to publish this part [5]

[1] https://sourceware.org/gdb/current/onlinedocs/gdb.html/Pytho...

[2] https://criu.org/

[3] https://gitlab.inria.fr/monitoring/verde

[4] https://hal.inria.fr/hal-01592671v1/file/ieee.pdf

[5] https://theses.hal.science/tel-02460734

Re: Stop Telling Everyone What You Do for a Living

#245

Post by kirso »

verelo wrote: post #109
version_five wrote: post #88

When I did my PhD I hated it when (most) people asked about my research. It's not because I wasn't interested, it's because I'm really interested and was (still am) bad at giving concise summaries, so I felt like people who really didn't care and wouldn't listen to the answer were asking me to embark on a long explanation that required a bunch of preamble etc, just in order to make conversation. Anyway, I feel largel…

I try play a game when i meet a new person: see how long i can go without discussing work with them. The best new connections tend to take the longest to reach work, it’s often a signal of a lazy conversation starter and like you said just an attempt to size up our social status.

I disagree.

I can't hold conversations about drinking in a pub discussing girls for very long. They seem insignificant.

However I did make lifelong friends by accidentally talking about Europe's energy policy, satellites and also the MySpace effect on youth.

Sizing social status is painful - I totally agree but when people are genuinely interested in going into depth of topics which highly resonate it produces an amazing effect.

Re: Stop Telling Everyone What You Do for a Living

#247

Post by tpoacher »

clnq wrote: post #77
flybrand wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My wife and I’s favorite game when meeting new people is to try and go as long as possible without talking about our work or asking about theirs. It makes it so much more interesting when careers / jobs finally enter the dialog.

Around a decade ago, I stopped asking people the basic questions, like what they do, where they're from, how old they are, or their gender and pronouns when that is unclear. I find that it's irrelevant and will bias the relationship for no good reason. I had a good friend with whom I mostly kept in touch over the phone and online for many years, and I didn't know their name until they died and I got a call from their…

You still need a topic though.

It's one thing to advise people what to avoid, and a completely different thing to give ideas what they could talk about to break the ice instead.

Otherwise it's like: "So, do you like coffee?" "No." "Ah. ... [tumbleweed] ... so, what do you do for a living?"

Re: Stop Telling Everyone What You Do for a Living

#248

Post by TRiG_Ireland »

impendia wrote: post #107
TRiG_Ireland wrote: post #67

A lot of people in the comments are suggesting alternative small talk, like "tell me what you did this weekend" or "tell me what you're about (?!)". I don't understand the need for any of that. You're meeting in some social environment: talk about that. If it's a dinner, talk about the food, or the host. If someone has just given a speech, talk about that. If you're at a sporting event, or a mediaeval reenactment eve…

I moved from San Francisco, where it was common to ask people "wnat do you do?", to South Carolina, where it's considered a little bit rude. For me, it was a painful transition; I no longer find it easy to get into enjoyable conversations with new people. I've always found it difficult to talk about, e.g. food. "Isn't this food great?" "Yeah, it's delicious"! Similarly with the weather, or any other conversation wher…

Generally, small talk serves to get people started: it makes the conversational juices flow. More interesting subjects may well then arise. (Or not, in which case, the brief conversation comes to a natural end, and you talk to someone else.)

Re: Stop Telling Everyone What You Do for a Living

#249

Post by DougN7 »

JohnFen wrote: post #237
DougN7 wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Love or hate the job, knowing what it is gives you insights/guesses into skillsets, education level, economic level, possibly the type of people they mingle with, etc, etc.

Perhaps, but talking with them for 15 minutes will do the same in any case.

That is true, and if it does the same, then asking about a job gets you there 15 minutes sooner. It’s an optimization.
Post reply on HN