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Ask HN: What was your most humbling learning moment?

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Re: Ask HN: What was your most humbling learning moment?

#581

Post by bombcar »

techsupporter wrote: post #19
lubujackson wrote: post #6

I was in my 20s before I realized even numbered houses are always on one side of the street and odd numbers on the other. Literally no excuse for not figuring that out.

One of those life experience moments: I "knew" this and a had a really good friend who did not. Both of us grew up in the same area, and we met in school, so you'd expect we should agree on this, right? While "arguing" about it one day, it turns out the suburb they'd grown up in had several private subdivisions where the builders could do whatever they wanted. Houses were numbered sequentially following one direction…

Even in the US with named/number streets "as normal" I know of at least three cases where the "front door moved" on a house on two streets, so the address number stayed the same but the street name changed, making it completely out of order.

Re: Ask HN: What was your most humbling learning moment?

#582

Post by hackmiester »

leemailll wrote: post #401
bloomingeek wrote: post #225

In 1993 I was interviewed for an operating job in a power plant for a major airline, assigned to their data center. At my current job, I was working in a high rise office building with sixty-six floors. The operating system computer was a JC8520, which was running a version of MS-DOS. All commands had to be typed in correctly or nothing would happen. While operating the plant, several commands had to be entered every…

>a power plant for a major airline an airline owns power plant?

Sure, why not. Delta Air Lines has a fuel refinery. Large air lines are quite the "at scale" operation.

Re: Ask HN: What was your most humbling learning moment?

#583

Post by bombcar »

dizhn wrote: post #207
perihelions wrote: post #7

I took my Thinkpad to a repair shop because its charging port was damaged. A very stoic human pointed out to me it has *two* identical ones, USB-C type, right next to each other.

I am confused. Does only one of them support charging? (I've got one where both can charge, though they don't look the same because one is also thunderbolt)

IIRC there was a MacBook with two USB-C ports where both could charge, but it would run significantly hotter (and throttle sooner) if the "wrong" one was used.

Re: Ask HN: What was your most humbling learning moment?

#584

Post by bombcar »

tcsenpai wrote: post #52

I worked as a sysadmin for a whole year before learning tab->autocomplete in linux

I still don't know all of the various commands you can use for history editing - I keep telling myself I'll learn more, but I never do.

https://github.com/rothgar/mastering-zsh/blob/master/docs/co...

Re: Ask HN: What was your most humbling learning moment?

#585

Post by mdip »

I have to go back to around 1992 or so for this one ... not that I don't have plenty of newer humbling learning moments, but this is the one I tend to think of as the most obvious "how did I do all of these things without knowing something so basic."

Background: I was in the 7th grade, hosting a BBS and wanted to simultaneously host two different BBSes behind the same modem (and both with a working FIDO feed). I can't remember specifically why, but it had something to do with how one of the two BBS systems detected if it should ingest messages or if it should return a user session. I believe I was handling that detection manually but still had to have the BBS setup in such a way that it would look for a specific exit code from FIDO and if it saw "0" (which was what it always saw in this configuration), it never provided a user session in response.

Let's start with the first problem. I had a non-working understanding of what an exit code actually was. This was all-together weird. I'm in 7th grade, but I'm taking AP Computer Science at the High School. I mean, I think by then I could actually make Wing Commander start or some equally heroic juggling of HIMEM statements with the various TSRs. I was writing actual software in Borland Turbo Pascal 4, compiled to an executable file, every one of which returned an exit code. I'm fairly certain the last statement of many of my programs was something along the lines of "RETURN 0;" if memory serves. I had even processed command-line arguments at this point!

In what easily made me look like the 7th-grader that I was, I called another programmer I had met on a local BBS (after 10:00 PM, no internet, long distance was expensive) who was writing a BBS application in "C" ... and asked him if he had any time that week to write me a quick program which took, as a parameter, any number 0-255 and exited with that exit code. You can't imagine how thankful I was when he was uploading the program to my second node before we had finished talking.

You can't imagine how stupid I felt when I found the seven hundred other ways this could be done, including with a BATCH file, that I had just never had any real reason, up to that point, to properly connect with the words "exit code" (it was an ERRORLEVEL, you could set it directly (?) in DOS).

Re: Ask HN: What was your most humbling learning moment?

#586

Post by Suppafly »

rcxdude wrote: post #139
massysett wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You'd think that he beat me at one thing by neglecting another, but nope, the guy was excelling in every category. This is literally impossible. A person cannot be Einstein and Picasso at the same time. A person cannot be Steve Jobs and Pope Francis at the same time. We all have limited time in life, and it is only possible to excel in one thing by focusing on it and, as a result, not focusing on something else. Th…

The point isn't that 'someone can be the best at everything'. It's 'some people can be better in every category than some other person', which is a heck of a lot more reasonable. I've certainly experienced it. Similarly to the poster above, I went from top of the class to middle of the pack in university, and in part that was because I didn't focus on the academics, instead working on student projects that were valua…

>and somehow also got more (or at least better) sleep than me

It must be better sleep, because these people also seem to only need 4 hours and yet are able to function at 100% the rest of the time, meanwhile I've been tired for 20 years no matter how much sleep I seem to get.

Re: Ask HN: What was your most humbling learning moment?

#587

Post by khazhoux »

jnsie wrote: post #571
khazhoux wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did a short-lived attempt at day-trading 15 years ago. Bought a few tens of thousands of NFLX, NVDA, and AMZN. Sold it all maybe a week later and made a couple thousand bucks, which I thought made me pretty smart.

I'm curious as to why you stopped (feel free to tell me to mind my own business!)?

Ha. The real question is why I didn't just hold. That $50K would now be like $10 million.

Re: Ask HN: What was your most humbling learning moment?

#588

Post by filleduchaos »

PUSH_AX wrote: post #487
filleduchaos wrote: post #408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is it diminishing sports to point out that they cause a hell of a lot more wear and tear (and involve a greater risk of injury) than sitting down for eight hours (for any reason) does? And no, unless you are counting things like chess as a sport (and/or conflating exercise with sports ), the vast majority of sports carry incredible risk of both minor and major injury compared to a sedentary lifestyle. Here[0] is…

100% of people who sit down for years will suffer damage that is very difficult to reverse. Unless they are proactive in counteracting. People don’t talk about soccer in this light because soccer players after retirement don’t have severe hip and glute mobility issues, they can also walk for more than 20 minutes without struggling. Are some of them dinged up? Yes. Some.

Soccer will absolutely leave you with mobility issues - it's a sport that puts immense and rather unnatural load on your hips, knees and ankles. The insistence that overloading your joints won't cause long-term damage when it's because of a sport but will cause damage when it's because of something "trivial" is pure magical thinking. I promise you your ligaments and bursae don't care if the physical stress they go through is "worthy" or not.

Also, it's rather disingenuous to (correctly) point out that long-term overloading of the lower spine and hips from sitting at a desk will develop into chronic conditions unless countered...and then completely dodge the fact that professional soccer players after retirement have had careers full of mitigation (from physiotherapy to outright surgery) paid for by their clubs[0] to counter the acute damage that they suffer. And even with that, plenty of professional athletes still develop issues like chronic ankle instability, because there is only so much you can "ding up" and repair an ankle before it simply loses its structural integrity. Those of us who do play sports know just how much damage there is to counter, and we don't all have a VC-sized budget backing us up to mitigate it.

For goodness' sake we colloquially name various conditions for sports ("golfer's/baseball elbow", "tennis elbow", "runner's knee", etc). I have zero idea how anyone would come to the conclusion that it's rare for sports played for significant amounts of time to damage the body - again, unless they are conflating them with more normal forms of exercise.

0. And yes, the fact that it's paid for by their clubs is important - as I implied in my original comment, the vast majority of employers who demand that office workers sit at their desks for hours at a stretch certainly don't take any responsibility for any serious medical issues that arise from that.

Re: Ask HN: What was your most humbling learning moment?

#589

Post by gknoy »

erhaetherth wrote: post #300
JohnMakin wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I learned this lesson when working on very fast paced projects with way fewer developer resources than needed. to ship a feature on time, shortcuts in quality have to be made, but you learn to make the shortcuts in a way that are easier to go back and clean up later. I became very fond of #TODO ‘s.

My manager gave me gruff the other day for adding a TODO that I had no intention of ever doing. TODOs are like a get out of jail free card. Don't want to do something the reviewer is likely going to call out? Just add a TODO.

I still find them helpful when the change is outside the cope of the current task. I especially like the ones that include both a reference to a Jira ticket (or similar), and an explanation of why, or any gotchas:

    # TODO: (CAFE-1256) Refactor steamed-liquid stuff to support non-dairy options
    #     We don't currently support non-dairy coffee additives, but once we do 
    #     we will need to ensure that the steamed-liquid transport 
    #     also alerts when users have a dairy allergy.
This is a lot of stuff to add for some things, so we might not want it everywhere, but it helps explain to a reader why we don't currently have it built (product doesn't need X yet), but also has hooks to existing (planned/canceled) tickets and is easily greppable (e.g. "non-dairy" or ticket name).

Re: Ask HN: What was your most humbling learning moment?

#590

Post by bane »

I've had a few humble pie experiences:

When I was young I set myself on a path to become a professional string musician. I practiced relentlessly and sat section lead and first chair in about 4 different school and local orchestras. I was relatively well known as the studious musician kid and there were some hopes that I was "going to go all the way".

Then I had a rough tryout for a regional orchestra, made it, but sat second to last in the section. Sitting last place was another player from my school who was decidedly "middling" in his skills. I was absolutely shattered. But then came to realize most of the players ranked higher than me were objectively better. I also realized that there was physically no way that I could add more practice time and we didn't have the resources to hire better private coaches. I simply didn't have the talent to "go pro".

I realized then that my dreams were never going to happen and I ended up spending several years in limbo before ending up in technology.

I'm actually happy I didn't end up in music, because now I get to putz around and make a few songs a year as a fun and fulfilling hobby, instead of being decades in, making next to nothing and trying to fill in the gaps with second jobs and private lessons. I also went on a few short tours and really disliked playing the same music over and over again.

Tech has been more interesting and I've had opportunities to have very large impacts in a few places that have given me immense satisfaction instead.

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