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

Slowness is a virtue

blog.jakobschwichtenberg.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 93 posts

Re: Slowness is a virtue

#71

Post by OutOfHere »

setopt wrote: post #31
OutOfHere wrote: post #24

All of the fast work will ideally soon be automated, leaving the fast workers with nothing to do but starve. In a righteous world, the slow workers who can change how the fast work is done will ultimately win.

In a "righteous world", no one would starve, regardless of their work style and performance.

Yes, although the fast workers currently intentionally make their slower coworkers starve (also while compromising on quality and innovation), so how about that. They have done this for years. Payback is a part of righteousness.

Re: Slowness is a virtue

#72

Post by Obscurity4340 »

jasode wrote: post #5

The timing of this article and the submission seems to coincide (and possibly a reaction) to the other story on HN frontpage: Working quickly is more important than it seems (2015) (jsomers.net) To clarify, some are misunderstanding James Somers to be advocating sloppy low quality work, as if he's recommending speed>quality. He's saying something else: remove latencies and delays to shorten feedback loops. Faster fee…

I've started to come around to this point of view, where I break down something i want to learn into more modular loops that I can get the most iterations of the basic result I want to get and save the rehearsing the whole thing for the end when I feel confident with each part. Otherwise, you basically have to unfluently rehearse and rehash content you're likely good for at the peril of never getting around to as or more important stuff further along

Re: Slowness is a virtue

#73

Post by aDyslecticCrow »

alfonsodev wrote: post #18
jasode wrote: post #5

The timing of this article and the submission seems to coincide (and possibly a reaction) to the other story on HN frontpage: Working quickly is more important than it seems (2015) (jsomers.net) To clarify, some are misunderstanding James Somers to be advocating sloppy low quality work, as if he's recommending speed>quality. He's saying something else: remove latencies and delays to shorten feedback loops. Faster fee…

Totally agree, how I see it, it's related to taking time to sharpen your axe. Having a defined flow that gives you quick feedback quick and doesn't get in the way. I you are writing, then you'd be using an app that you can quickly do what you want, e.g shortcuts for bold, vim/emacs motions, that "things-not-getting-in-the-way" state is what leads to flow state, in my opinion. Muscle memory is action for free, then yo…

The energy threshold for adding a new unit test to the suite and a new row to the docs are vital for it to be done.

If I need to install pandoc to test compile a doc change before i submit it for code review with 3 other maintainers, id rather keep my note or useful screenshot to myself.

If i need to create a c binding of my function so that pytest can run it through 50 rows of cryptic CMake, I'd rather do happy testing locally and submit it as a "trust me bro".

Good and fast international tooling matters massively for good software. And it all comes back to speed and iteration loop.

On top of that, slow meticulous work can then be done. 100% test coverage, detailed uml diagrams describing the system, and functional safety risk analysis matrix documents.

So speed and slowness supplement in different levels of analysis.

Re: Slowness is a virtue

#74

Post by shevy-java »

"Development is the execution of a map toward a goal while research is the pursuit of a goal without a map."

Uhm? That's not my definition of development. Actually the word itself has different meansing - see development biology, from a fertilised egg to some adult animal. But even if the context here is meant for planning research, ALL research also has steps. For instance if you write for a grant, you have to lay down the idea(s) in more details, then after you gotten the grant (hopefully), you will continue to do more planning. So there are definitely planned steps here too. You just can not always plan results or success; see the discovery of penicillin. While it was not 100% random, it was still more of a side-finding than a planned finding.

Also, slowness ... I don't think slowness in and by itself is a virtue. Some things are more complicated and take time to realise. See how Darwin drew the first tree of life with a pencil or pen. Reaching this point in time took some prior thinking.

Re: Slowness is a virtue

#75

Post by aDyslecticCrow »

socketcluster wrote: post #17

Great article. I like the simple point about the hypothetical IQ test sent one week in advance. It makes a strong case about time being the true bottleness. I think this same idea could be applied to most tests. Implicit in the design of most tests is the idea that a person's ability to quickly solve moderately difficult problems implies a proportional ability to solve very difficult problems if given more time. This…

> Implicit in the design of most tests is the idea that a person's ability to quickly solve moderately difficult problems implies a proportional ability to solve very difficult problems if given more time. This is clearly jumping to a conclusion. I doubt there is any credible evidence to support this.

I think this approach is effectively testing if a student studied the material. It makes the correlation between memorization and understanding. Recall a piece of information is fast if avaliable.

Its a commonly expressed experience among university students that learning memorization techniques and focusing on solving previous exams is a disproportionately effectively way to pass courses.

It's technically more impressive to pass the exam by never doing a single similar problem before and deriving a solving method or forumla that wasn't memorised.

I took deliberate effort to avoid looking at previous exam question for a course until the week before, since it cased good grades at little value to me long term.

Re: Slowness is a virtue

#76

Post by bitexploder »

jasode wrote: post #5

The timing of this article and the submission seems to coincide (and possibly a reaction) to the other story on HN frontpage: Working quickly is more important than it seems (2015) (jsomers.net) To clarify, some are misunderstanding James Somers to be advocating sloppy low quality work, as if he's recommending speed>quality. He's saying something else: remove latencies and delays to shorten feedback loops. Faster fee…

There is a very important concept in security engineering around feedback loops. Consider the following: A vulnerability is discovered 5 years after it was introduced. The issue is patched and life goes on for the engineering organization that discovered it. Some time passes and they discover an architectural flaw and that the issue was not isolated. They must now expend precious effort fixing this entire flaw and the 5 years of dependencies that accreted on it. Now, consider, the team that designed this system and the engineer that implemented it discover the vulnerability leading to the architectural issue within two weeks. They refactor the code and eliminated generational security debt. Not to mention the engineers that wrote the code are not around 5 years later further increasing the "interest" on the debt.

I would note you might see this as another bland "shift left" argument and you could definitely view if through this lens. But if you consider it from a systems thinking lens it actually incorporates dynamics that are not typically included in shift left. It helps you consider the system within your organization and how to shorten those feedback loops. It also, conveniently, makes engineering organizations stronger as a whole as these feedback loops are also intrinsically linked to the organizations software development process as a whole. It is pretty hard to have a tight security vulnerability discovery loop without a good software engineering practice around it. For security issues like this they are effectively a strict subset of software quality issues.

You can apply this feedback loop shortening to /so/ many things in life.

Re: Slowness is a virtue

#77

Post by chrisweekly »

zwnow wrote: post #53
chrisweekly wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmm, I've been doing webdev for a living since 1998, intimately familiar w/ the complete history and modern practices, and I respectful disagree. Pretty sure it's a good thing we're not all forced to do things the same way. And the new SSR with CSR capabilities is not at all the same as the old SSR. You're right that auth is kind of a hot mess though.

> And the new SSR with CSR capabilities is not at all the same as the old SSR Yea I know its just a display of the industries indecisiveness. Everytime we need something new and fresh some old favorite is revived until after 5 years its old again. I like being able to do things differently, I hate having to implement "security" features knowing all too well that they aren't secure at all. Minimizing attack surface sh…

Sorry, no, you seem to have misunderstood that I'm disagreeing with you. Modern SSR is not just a return to the same old thing.

Re: Slowness is a virtue

#79

Post by lachlan_gray »

Jensson wrote: post #64
lachlan_gray wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think part of the message is that speed isn't a free lunch. If an intelligence can solve "legible" problems quickly, it's symptomatic of a specific adaption for identifying short paths. So when you factor speed into tests, you're systematically filtering for intelligences that are biased to avoid novelty. Then if someone is slow to solve the same problems, it's actually a signal that they have the opposite bias, to…

> Then if someone is slow to solve the same problems, it's actually a signal that they have the opposite bias, to consider more paths. No this isn't true, most of the time they just don't consider any paths at all and are just dumb. And the bias towards novelty doesn't make you slow, ADHD is biased towards novelty and people wouldn't call those slow.

What I meant is, assuming that they do find solutions. If they're not doing anything of course that's different.

In the article, "speed" is about reaching specific answers in a specific window of time, the bane of ADHD.

Re: Slowness is a virtue

#80

Post by zwnow »

chrisweekly wrote: post #77
zwnow wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And the new SSR with CSR capabilities is not at all the same as the old SSR Yea I know its just a display of the industries indecisiveness. Everytime we need something new and fresh some old favorite is revived until after 5 years its old again. I like being able to do things differently, I hate having to implement "security" features knowing all too well that they aren't secure at all. Minimizing attack surface sh…

Sorry, no, you seem to have misunderstood that I'm disagreeing with you. Modern SSR is not just a return to the same old thing.

It most definitely is. Same old shit with a twist. Also apparently all web devs are cloudslaves nowadays as well. Webdev is dead.
Post reply on HN