[HN Gopher] Feynman: I am burned out and I'll never accomplish a...
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Feynman: I am burned out and I'll never accomplish anything (1985)
Author : ent101
Score : 826 points
Date : 2021-04-25 09:05 UTC (13 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.asc.ohio-state.edu)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.asc.ohio-state.edu)
| SavantIdiot wrote:
| This reminds me of my first year out of college in 198x at my
| first job when I really really enjoyed learning and playing and
| growing. Fast forward 20 years into my career I was burned out
| and forced higher and higher up, to the point where every
| misunderstanding or new idea was a chance for me to stumble and
| be overcome by interdepartmental competition. Constant joy turned
| into constant fear in just two decades.
| shannifin wrote:
| Love that sort of infectious enthusiasm. I guess the question for
| me is how to balance that sort of explorational play with
| actually trying to accomplish something, like starting a start-
| up. The lure of playing with something constantly challenges the
| need to focus on finishing something that in the moment seems
| less interesting.
| Netcob wrote:
| Goal-oriented work, creativity and motivation definitely have a
| difficult relationship.
|
| In programming, I learn the most things simply by experimenting
| at home on my own. I'm thinking about switching jobs, so I wanted
| to learn some new frameworks and concepts to help with that, and
| I decided to make my personal projects a bit more "professional".
| Use continuous integration, focus more on web stuff, build and
| automatically deploy containers and so on.
|
| Big mistake. I don't want to spend my leisure time fighting with
| tools, debugging build processes that break all the time, make
| sense of docker's tagging system and so on. I don't mind
| programming all day, because I love programming, but I do mind
| working all day.
|
| So I let it go. I'll come up with my own tools. They won't be
| great, but I'll have fun making them. And then it'll feel nice
| using them. And then I'll work on whatever excites me.
|
| Once in a while someone will ask me "how do you know all these
| things?" and my answer has always been "I don't know that much, I
| just randomly got interested in this particular topic and decided
| to play around with it". Over the years/decades, that adds up!
| swat535 wrote:
| This is exactly why the more I think about it, the more I just
| want to git-push-heroku-goodbye and be done with it.
|
| I don't care about setting and maintaining AWS instances,
| docker containers and jenkins.
|
| The older I get, the more I realize how precious my time is and
| now I have very little patience for anyone or anything that
| wastes it.
|
| This is also why I've basically cut off all social medias from
| my life (except HN occasionally), have always preferred working
| from home to avoid wasting time in traffic, have cut off people
| who I don't enjoy spending time with and spend more time with
| my family instead.
| SaltyBackendGuy wrote:
| Same.
|
| I completely overbuilt a recent side project and ended up
| scraping the whole thing because it wastes too much time to
| maintain it. As much as I love building new projects, having
| children at home reminds me that time is my only true
| resource and it's better spent with the kiddos (at least at
| this stage of my life).
| yowlingcat wrote:
| Asking because I feel this way a lot too -- is this the
| kind of thing that was avoidable (IE if you built it on
| Rails/Django + Heroku would that have cut down the
| maintenance), or was there intrinsic complexity to the
| project that made it unavoidable?
|
| More and more, I want to build things that are in the
| former category if I build them at all outside of work.
| ativzzz wrote:
| Depends on what you're building. Rails/django/heroku are
| web app accelerators. If you are building a web app, then
| yea they make it super easy and take away a lot of having
| to think about complex systems, but if you're building
| anything else not really
| SaltyBackendGuy wrote:
| In my particular case, I opened the CI/CD can of worms
| using Docker (which obviously has great use cases). My
| use case could have fit into a Rails/Django + Heroku
| model that would have saved me a bunch of time. I thought
| by investing in the infra early it would save me time
| later, however later will likely never come. So basically
| I spent more time debugging issues due to adding
| infrastructure complexity than developing the actual
| project.
|
| TLDR; Wasn't a total loss as I did learn some, however I
| would have rather spend more time on developing the
| actual product (or in retrospect more time with my
| family).
| TranquilMarmot wrote:
| I recently switched all of my personal projects from being
| self hosted on a linode with a complex nginx setup to just
| using Netlify... never going back.
| Oras wrote:
| Hear hear! I wish one day the dev community will understand
| that its never about the tools and more about the delivery.
| The customer does not give a monkey if the backend is node,
| go or PHP. You do not impress anyone by using React, redux,
| amber, angular ... etc. All people care about is a solution
| to a problem they have.
|
| However, from my experience, this is not a popular opinion
| among developers.
| moksly wrote:
| Isn't the development community sort of there? I mean, most
| things are still run on PHP, and honestly, I recently saw
| an open source "forms for the public sector" thing build in
| Drupal, and now I'm wondering if we'll ever need another
| custom programmed form for our web facing applications.
|
| Yet if I go back to my non-management dev friends and talk
| about this, they are all like "eeeew, what about X and Y"
| and I'm just like, but neither the citizens or my IT
| operations staff gives two shits about any of that.
|
| I'm not going to say what is right technically, because I'm
| not qualified to do that, but I do know what will happen as
| it's my decision, and we'll be slowly moving all our
| customs forms to a PHP CMS system and we're just going to
| shoot the docket container it comes in directly out into
| our internal Azure cloud with public access through our
| national identity system (NemID). My developers aren't
| going to be out of work either, but instead of making the
| same form with small differences 9000 times, they will be
| building Drupal modules with actual challenges.
| Oras wrote:
| > Yet if I go back to my non-management dev friends and
| talk about this, they are all like "eeeew, what about X
| and Y" and I'm just like, but neither the citizens or my
| IT operations staff gives two shits about any of that.
|
| That's exactly what I meant. I remember arguing with a
| colleague who over-engineered a simple ORM table by
| having 3 classes. One was just an empty class, the other
| was an empty interface, and the third was the actual
| class. When I asked why did you make it this way? He
| said: "What if we decided to use Mongo later?
|
| Technically he was right but practically, he was wrong! I
| saw this overthinking and over-engineering pattern across
| many in-house dev teams. But this is just my experience,
| and I'm not judging what is right and wrong from devs
| point of view. Every decision has its context, but I saw
| how these complications affecting the delivery and
| customer experience badly.
| 01000101 wrote:
| For some reason the first time I do something I always
| over engineer it... it took me a lot of self growth to
| take feedback like yours seriously and not get defensive
| of my "what-if" thought patterns.
| pocketgrok wrote:
| I've gotten into the habit of just pumping out a naive
| solution without worrying about anything and then
| throwing it away and re-building more thoughtfully
| because now I have full sense of the scope and some
| immediate edge-cases. As long as the thing is small
| enough to do that.
| allenu wrote:
| Yup, I agree it's likely not a popular opinion. In my
| experience, developers love developing frameworks and
| tools, even when it isn't necessary.
|
| I mean, it's just fun. Developers are biased to do things
| that make work interesting, even if it's superfluous. We
| think that coming up with a better framework or tool will
| save time in the future. I think that often it's just a
| wash or a net negative since you now have to maintain this
| tool AND when you first start on creating it, you are sort
| of naive about what it needs to support, so you open
| yourself up to a lot of hurt later when clients of your
| tool come up with more requirements than you envisioned.
| nkingsy wrote:
| Popular open source tools are a poor substitute for
| standards, but they are better than nothing.
|
| Standards matter if you want to show your code to someone
| else
| paledot wrote:
| Which is why I open my conversational interviews with,
| "There's an emergency, sales promised a customer a to-do
| list app yesterday. It's getting shipped out and forgotten,
| you're doing it on your own, only thing that matters is
| it's done fast. What do you use?". And then of course I
| spring the, "Okay, now it's becoming a flagship product.
| How do you onboard co-workers? How do you pivot to ongoing
| maintenance? What problems do you anticipate scaling it
| out?". But it's always important to have a tool in your
| toolbox to hack something together in an afternoon, even if
| it's just to prove a point.
| scottLobster wrote:
| As a candidate that would be a hell of a red flag,
| particularly as an opener. After answering I would
| definitely follow up with "are situations like those an
| expected part of my day-to-day?" and minutely examine
| your response. Even if the rest of the interview went
| swimmingly that opener would give me pause after the
| fact.
|
| That question translates to me as "your sister
| teams/leadership/communication infrastructure are
| completely incompetent/lacking and you're on the spot to
| pull an 18 hour shift to clean up their mess. What do you
| do?"
|
| Sure occasional unforeseen emergencies/breakdowns in
| communication are expected even at the best of companies,
| but I'd replace it with a hypothetical that makes the
| company sound fundamentally competent. Perhaps something
| like "The company has promised the customer a To-Do List
| App, however automated testing failed to catch a mission-
| critical edge-case. This comes to light the day before
| it's supposed to be delivered. The flaw is so fundamental
| that the app will have to be re-written. Everyone else is
| handling other parts of the delivery, so you're on the
| spot to do it on your own. The only thing that matters is
| that it's done fast. What do you use?"
| Viliam1234 wrote:
| Devil's Advocate: Interview questions are almost never
| related to the actual job. Why would the candidate assume
| otherwise in this case?
| scottLobster wrote:
| Fair point. I'd say it's sensible for the candidate to
| assume that context added to any hypothetical is there to
| inform their answer. Why add the context if it's not
| meant to inform? At that point it becomes fluff at best
| and misleading at worst.
|
| It would make no sense for an interviewer to provide
| meaningless context unless they were deliberately
| attempting to distract from the the question, or are
| otherwise simply incompetent/unfocused. I don't see how
| gas-lighting candidates would be a productive mode of
| interview, particularly given that each party only has
| the interview from which to judge each others' character.
| Even if the candidate were to successfully discern the
| gas-lighting, all it would do is prevent trust from being
| formed. At that point every interaction would be subject
| to question.
|
| So with the assumption that gas-lighting is not the
| intent and that the hiring party is competent, the
| question is how is the context meant to inform the
| response?
|
| Given that the interviewer is gauging the candidate's
| ability to perform a job, it is sensible to assume that
| realistic-sounding context applied to a question is meant
| to see how the candidate would perform in what the
| interviewer deems a "realistic" scenario.
|
| If the scenario is unrealistic but meant to impart other
| information, then it should be obvious or stated as such,
| so that the candidate can attempt to parse to the correct
| information from the scenario to inform their response.
|
| If the point is merely to motivate the candidate to
| answer the question by placing themselves in a narrative,
| I'd argue they should be motivated enough by the fact
| that they're in a job interview, without the need for
| unrealistic scenarios. If they aren't then they clearly
| aren't taking the position seriously or likely have other
| issues that would impact their job performance even if
| hired.
|
| Take the hypothetical removed from context: "You have
| make a deployable to-do list app as quickly as possible,
| speed and basic functionality are the only priorities.
| What tools do you use?..." That format accomplishes the
| same goal of revealing the candidate's knowledge of what
| a quick/dirty workflow looks like. The followup questions
| mentioned "what problems to you anticipate when scaling
| the solution? How would you on-board coworkers? How would
| you shift from rapid development to ongoing maintenance?
| etc" would then flesh out the candidate's knowledge
| equally as well.
| paledot wrote:
| I'd make a note of that response and count it in your
| favour. But if you get sidetracked enough that you never
| end up answering the question, that's also not a good
| sign.
|
| IMO your counterexample is wildly implausible, and is
| likely to sidetrack the candidate. "Is nothing
| salvageable? What was the flaw? What automated testing?
| Do I have to use that testing in my alternative fix? How
| does that reflect on the rest of my tech stack choice?"
| scottLobster wrote:
| True, just came up with it off the top of my head. I
| suppose it is possible to be too detailed in such
| questions. Point being it at least makes it sound like
| the company was doing the right things and got hit out of
| left field, vs stepping in a pile of their own making and
| making you responsible for fixing it.
|
| Perhaps a more innocent miscommunication like the
| customer failed to clearly communicate requirements, and
| it was just discovered in an email conversation that they
| were expecting and as-of-yet un-implemented To-Do List
| App in the current release, which is shipping
| tomorrow/this week/etc. I've experienced situations like
| that before, not sure how applicable it is to your
| business.
| ric2b wrote:
| That would give me a bad impression as a candidate.
|
| It's like you're aware of the issue (sales doesn't give
| two shits about the capacity of the engineering team) but
| you want someone that is good at wasting a lot of time
| efficiently instead of improving communication with the
| sales team.
| solipsism wrote:
| And then as a hiring manager I get the impression that
| this candidate doesn't understand hypotheticals, which is
| a big red flag. Happily, we will come to mutual agreement
| on whether you proceed.
| scottLobster wrote:
| As a candidate I by definition know practically nothing
| about your company and how it operates internally save
| for maybe some glassdoor reviews, and you're supposed to
| be judging how I would perform as a part of said company,
| same way I'm judging whether the position is worth my
| time or not.
|
| If all your hypotheticals revolve around cleaning up the
| mess of flagrantly incompetent coworkers/leadership I'm
| going to get the impression that that's what I'm expected
| to do all the time. You could get the same information
| with different hypotheticals, so there's no point in
| making your company sound like a horrible place to work.
|
| Happily, we would come to a mutual decision that I should
| produce profits for someone else. It sounds like you're
| one of those managers who wants supplicants, not
| applicants. Good luck with that.
| solipsism wrote:
| I wouldn't hire someone without telling them plenty about
| where they will work. You don't have to guess what the
| workplace is like by decoding my questions. You are
| certainly welcome to, but the obvious danger is that you
| will get something wrong. A mature person would just ask,
| and that's the type of person I would want to hire.
|
| _It sounds like you 're one of those managers who wants
| supplicants, not applicants._
|
| Absolutely not. I want human beings with whom I can have
| a good relationship with, based in communication. I
| definitely don't want to hire a robot who is making
| important assumptions based on questionable (and totally
| wrong) heuristics, and Not bothering to ask simple
| questions.
|
| So yeah, someone applying a weird algorithm to the
| questions I'm asking them isn't going to be a good fit.
| bstar77 wrote:
| It's not popular because it's not realistic in most
| environments. In many cases it's advantageous to use those
| things you listed because that's what the market can
| provide talent-wise. I'd rather deal with learning new tech
| that's well documented than some custom lib that "just
| works" but no one understands because the architect left
| years ago. My whole career has been about consistent
| education, so that doesn't intimidate me. Working on
| undocumented architectures that I have to make substantial
| changes to (and not knowing all of the side effects) is
| what intimidates me.
|
| Turnover is a reality that can't be ignored. New people
| come in and now have to figure out something that reads
| like a stream of conscience. It isn't well documented,
| doesn't follow the latest best practices and doesn't
| support modern paradigms and uses outdated frameworks/libs,
| but works great.
|
| The apps I build always take into consideration the talent
| pool my employer intends to pull from. The reality is that
| they (usually) can't hire general "technologists" that are
| proficient at all layers of the stack. If the project is
| something that only you will ever work on, then you can do
| whatever you want and this whole conversation is moot.
| solipsism wrote:
| _it 's advantageous to use those things you listed
| because that's what the market can provide talent-wise_
|
| More silliness. Pay developers enough so that they'll
| stick around. If they stick around, then you don't need
| to hire for talent in a particular framework or language.
| You can hire for intelligence, creativity, passion,
| drive, whatever... and invest in training people when
| they get there.
|
| Jumping from framework to framework and language to
| language as the talent pool does is incredibly wasteful.
| bstar77 wrote:
| > Pay developers enough so that they'll stick around
|
| It's amazing FANG companies have any turnover based on
| that logic. Turnover happens for a variety of reasons...
| like global pandemics... you can't make a blanket
| statement like that and expect to be taken seriously.
| solipsism wrote:
| Sorry, I was speaking in common parlance and assuming
| most readers would realize that I don't mean _literally 0
| turnover_.
| Oras wrote:
| I believe you have agreed with me in your points
| especially regarding talent and turnover. The shiny tech
| today will be a legacy 6 months later or a year if you're
| lucky. Then the talent pool will change and you can't
| attract the devs who religiously follow new trends.
| You'll end up hiring people to deal with your {legacy}
| system or as you pointed out .. substantial changing it.
| bstar77 wrote:
| React/Redux/Angular all have staying power so I don't
| understand your point. I don't know what you mean by
| "shiny" tech. Other than specific libs that go
| unmaintained, most popular tech has some staying power.
| dontbeabill wrote:
| it is amazing to me that after 20 years of doing this, and
| endless river of new "tools" to help, it has become a
| labyrinth of config files, aws, IAM, deploy complexity and
| unenjoyable "stuff".
|
| i feel like i used to "build things" to solve problems. now
| it's just unwind a bunch of complexity for the sake of
| complexity
| buffalobuffalo wrote:
| I still use Heroku for almost all my personal projects. I
| stopped for a while, but they now allow you to dockerize your
| projects and push them to their registry. They also allow you
| to have multiple apps with access to shared resources. Those
| two changes have made it much more flexible than it was back
| in the early days.
|
| You never realize how much configuration of AWS is like
| pulling teeth until you stop.
| fakedang wrote:
| I'm going through literally what you mentioned last. I had
| a very simply API built on lambdas for a side project, that
| worked perfectly fine till last month. But now, every minor
| change I make to that code results in some error or the
| other that I can't figure out for the life of me. It has
| been so bad that I had to quit the project altogether.
| dizzy3gg wrote:
| Ditto, recently moved from AWS to render.com It's like a
| cheaper Heroku, it's been stable so far. I do use GitHub
| actions to run a small pipeline on projects but its a far cry
| from Jenkins.
| hpcjoe wrote:
| This 1000x.
|
| Sadly the extended out of state family seems to like FB, and
| I try to follow science/math twitter.
|
| As you get older, something in you clicks, that you realize
| that time spent being angry, or combative, reduces the time
| you have for enjoying things (family, life, etc.).
|
| Your time on earth is a zero sum game. Maximize its utility,
| maximize your enjoyment, minimize your negativity (e.g.
| outrage of the day on social media). Your life will be
| better.
| prox wrote:
| Even better (imo) is going beyond the maximization maxim
| and realise the "beauty" of the analog, a world you
| directly see, hear, touch. Just existing without a specific
| goal, which is indeed similar as a vacation / holiday.
| However people seem to reserve the "no goal" mindset only
| on vacation, but you could also integrate it into your
| life.
| dkdk8283 wrote:
| I have no goals, it's great!
|
| Absolute freedom. I do as I feel most of the time and I'm
| very lucky to be able to do so.
| teraku wrote:
| Your cognitive workload is too high.
|
| There are three forms of cognitive workload: Intrinsic,
| External and Germane.
|
| Intrinsic is things you just *know*. How to write a class in
| java, how to write a query in SQL, ...
|
| External is stuff you only need occasionally, and need to look
| up every time: How to deploy to X, how to set up CI/CD, ...
|
| Germane is context knowledge. Usually referred to as business
| knowledge.
|
| You want to keep external cognitive load a minimal as possible.
| You can really dig deployment and stuff, and then this becomes
| your intrinsic cognitive workload and coding becomes more or
| less external, but for somebody who just likes to code, it's
| best to once do a deep dive to deployment logics, write a
| scaffold and stick with an automated version forever.
| justinclift wrote:
| > it's best to ...
|
| What are you basing this opinion on? :)
|
| ---
|
| As an aside, the blog in your profile link (
| https://teraku.me) has an invalid HTTPS cert. Seems to be for
| a different domain.
| teraku wrote:
| Moved domains a while ago, but forgot to fix it at HN.
| Fixed it now
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| Once you're connected, it seems to serve the right cert for
| some reason. Badly-configured shared hosting?
| nickthemagicman wrote:
| I don't know why you're being devoted, this is interesting.
| Netcob wrote:
| I tried that, and at first it almost worked. But that
| scaffolding just kept breaking. TeamCity doesn't want to
| execute my unit tests since I've upgraded to .Net 5.0, I
| still don't get how that docker "latest" tag works, my
| Ubuntu-TeamCity-Agent refuses to acknowledge it's running in
| Linux and that it has access to docker. After a while I
| realized I was wasting precious free time.
|
| But I agree about the cognitive load. I have ADHD so in order
| to qualify as "high functioning" I need to continuously
| improve my coping strategies when it comes to keeping that
| load low. I write everything down. My thought process is
| anchored in long text files with hundreds of indented lists.
| My programming style is super verbose and perhaps a bit
| enterprisey, but each class does one thing and I always spend
| extra effort making sure the things I can re-use work well
| enough that it's safe to forget how they work.
|
| Oddly enough, my reserves are much bigger when it comes to
| programming. I remember having trouble with some linear
| algebra homework - it involved a lot of matrix calculations,
| and my results just didn't make sense, and I couldn't focus
| long enough. So I programmed it instead, and it worked
| immediately and solved my homework. I think it was about
| change of basis, which actually got me side-tracked because I
| realized the same code could be used for a simple 3D
| renderer. And that's what got me into computer graphics. What
| was the topic again?
| yonaguska wrote:
| I also programming my linear algebra homework assignments,
| and then nearly failed the class. Didn't really learn it
| until I had to use it for more interesting combinatorics.
|
| Also adhd, and our coping mechanisms are similar.
| MeinBlutIstBlau wrote:
| Quit normalizing work in your free time for this field. There
| is no other field that has such a brash concept that we all
| should work for free to do this. We have a skill. If an
| employer needs a highly specialized version of it, they better
| pay to train you to learn it.
| temporama1 wrote:
| > I'll come up with my own tools. They won't be great, but...
|
| They WILL be great. They'll do exactly what YOU need them to
| do, and nothing else.
|
| Software at present is a disaster, partly because we're just
| piling on complexity all the time, thinking only of the
| benefits and never of the huge downsides ("fighting with
| tools").
| Netcob wrote:
| That's true, and personally I'd much rather fight with my own
| code since I usually 100% understand what it does.
|
| In a team of course it would be different - unless I
| perfectly document my own code, my colleagues would be better
| off with something they can actually google.
| shawnz wrote:
| Everyone who develops a tool did it because they thought
| their tool would be great, and do exactly what they needed
| better than everything else that existed previously.
|
| Everyone has slightly different needs, so that is exactly
| what creates the complexity disaster you are talking about. I
| think that being more willing to re-use the existing work of
| past developers actually works to reduce this problem.
| goodpoint wrote:
| > I don't want to spend my leisure time fighting with tools,
| debugging build processes that break all the time, make sense
| of docker's tagging system
|
| Now that CV-driven development is the standard, we are forced
| to learn new bloated "devops" tools and services every year.
|
| This type of knowledge expires very quickly.
|
| Also these tools and services do not develop communities:
| business users drop last-year tools like hot potatoes when a
| new cheaper or shit^ny one comes along.
|
| This hype-fueled corporate-driven culture is not going to end
| well.
| [deleted]
| Uehreka wrote:
| People on HN are always deriding the "tech hedonic
| treadmill", but I find it interesting that this meme seems to
| have reached maturity in 2015, and the list of things they
| point to as "the new trendy thing this year" has been the
| same ever since: Some combo of Node.js, React, webpack,
| Docker and Kubernetes.
|
| I think this meme was still fairly true then: Node was at
| risk of splitting into Node.js and IO.js, React was still
| new-ish and people were (rightfully) panicking over the
| drastic changes coming in Angular v2, Docker was still new-
| ish and there were arguments over whether Docker Swarm or
| Kubernetes was the future. But nowadays Node has stabilized,
| React and webpack have been comfortably dominant for years,
| Docker's model of containers won out a long time ago and
| Kubernetes is there if you need it, but is mostly useful for
| people building a PaaS.
|
| If people don't want to learn these things, then fine, but I
| do wish the overall mood here would update to reflect the
| fact that we are now living in a much more stable time than
| when these memes were created.
| ex_amazon_sde wrote:
| > we are now living in a much more stable time than when
| these memes were created
|
| Quite the opposite. The cambrian explosion of tools and
| SaaS is getting faster and the average useful lifetime of
| anything released today is getting shorter.
| majewsky wrote:
| New hypothesis: People like to move on to the next thing
| once they have mastered the current thing, so in a weird
| co-evolution, those tools-of-the-year evolved to not be
| masterable and thus people haven't been able to move on
| yet.
|
| Also, you shall shortly be smited for not having included
| Rust in that list. :)
| lumost wrote:
| Sometimes I wonder if modern corporate culture has adopted
| soviet style newspeak.
|
| Why are we immigrating to the new thing? For the same reasons
| as we migrated to the old thing. Why is the new thing better?
| Because it's just so much better.
| weehoo wrote:
| If you can convince the higher ups that migrating tooling
| provides business value, you can do something that requires
| zero insight or creativity for a few months and at the end
| of it be promoted for organizing a successful migration
| despite delivering zero measurable business value. The
| effects of the migration are gonna be second and higher
| order effects that are impossible to separate from the rest
| of the business so you can just claim the tooling was the
| leverage that let the people doing first order work
| succeed. Being a tool astronaut lets you claim a portion of
| everyone else in your orgs success without ever taking a
| professional risk, since your odds of being called out for
| an ineffectual change are near zero, since there's no first
| order signals.
|
| I'm not saying modern tooling is useless; I don't use ed,
| cc, and make for my development. But there's a huge
| difference between a zero to one tooling effort and an N to
| N+1 tooling effort. The first one requires figuring out all
| the implicit/implied/manual parts of the process. The
| second one is often just turning one set of configuration
| languages into another.
| goodpoint wrote:
| > huge difference between a zero to one tooling effort
| and an N to N+1 tooling effort
|
| Spot on. There's a serious point of diminishing returns
| when piling up tools.
|
| At some point the cost of learning, adapting, deploying,
| maintaining yet another tool becomes a net negative.
|
| Often the solution is to replace 5 fancy tools with 100
| lines of Python and Bash.
| mclightning wrote:
| Holy cow. This! Exactly this! It happened in big corp., I
| am working at right now. As an engineer, I just watched
| it happen. When I tried to explain to other engineers,
| most didn't get it. Only a few got the trajectory we were
| put in by higher ups for credits they were aiming to get.
| But those few were onboard or powerless as me.
|
| We just observed it happen. As the engineers, we did our
| job best we could regardless. Things broke, we fixed.
| Somethings rolled back, and even for those they claimed
| credit & celebrated for re-inventing the wheel.
| jeremyjh wrote:
| Because there are people for whom "playing" means
| implementing new devops tools, cluster managers,
| application servers, etc. In production.
| bredren wrote:
| I had the opposite happen. I had been building servers for my
| (largely Django-based) projects using long txt files from old
| digital ocean tutorials I had customized.[1]
|
| I fought docker and all of that but had some time last year
| between gigs and spent a few weeks examining the state of
| things and experimenting. The most influential of works were
| recent guides by Michael Herman. [2]
|
| In the process I learned to set up not fully reproducible
| server setups but branch and commit message-specific CI/CD
| workflows using Github Actions.
|
| It turns out it is like most things, hard and complicated until
| you know and have living samples and then it seems relatively
| straightforward and efficient.
|
| GA is still fairly young and there is still opportunity to
| create and share flourishes of art in devops there.
|
| [1] https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-
| set-...
|
| [2] https://testdriven.io/blog/deploying-django-to-
| digitalocean-...
| sqqqqrly wrote:
| I love your "it adds up" comment. I will steal this. It is very
| true for me as well.
|
| Several years ago, I started using make extensively. Not to
| compile, but to automate. Make understands failing and
| dependencies. Also, bash and zsh have wonderful completions.
|
| I used to write a bash or python script to do this. They often
| turned into their own projects and were painful to document.
|
| A great make example (thanks Aaron) is on YT: Using Terraform,
| Packer, and Ansible Together": https://youtu.be/pkEezNSFWtA.
| Aaron automated it all with make.
|
| Ya, I know... Make was created in 1976 to compile Fortran. It's
| old school. I love it.
|
| I use it to test my kubernetes CSI driver on 5 versions of k3s
| with a single make call. That call is the tip of a dependency
| tree. The leaves end up being a line or three of bash running
| Ansible, Go, Helm, etc, but could be anything.
|
| Documentation is simple because the make dependencies are so
| easy to follow. They are much of the documentation. The docs
| are correct because we execute them.
| Balgair wrote:
| > Once in a while someone will ask me "how do you know all
| these things?" and my answer has always been "I don't know that
| much, I just randomly got interested in this particular topic
| and decided to play around with it". Over the years/decades,
| that adds up!
|
| "Don't become a well-rounded person. Well-rounded people are
| smooth and dull. Become a throughly spiky person"
|
| -Bruce Sterling
| [deleted]
| shawnz wrote:
| Is this really a matter of tooling versus programming, or is it
| a matter of wanting to create rather than wanting to re-use the
| work of others?
|
| Even purely in code, you always (EDIT: usually) have the choice
| of implementing a solution yourself or finding the work of
| someone else, packaged into a library, which solves the problem
| for you.
|
| Implementing the solution yourself may be the most satisfying
| way to scratch that instantaneous creative itch. But does it
| create the end result which you can be most proud of or
| satisfied with?
| klyrs wrote:
| > Even purely in code, you always have the choice of
| implementing a solution yourself or finding the work of
| someone else, packaged into a library, which solves the
| problem for you.
|
| In my experience, this isn't remotely true, especially if
| you're constrained to use a particular language and don't
| want to pay the overhead of wrapping another language
| WrtCdEvrydy wrote:
| > Big mistake. I don't want to spend my leisure time fighting
| with tools, debugging build processes that break all the time,
| make sense of docker's tagging system and so on. I don't mind
| programming all day, because I love programming, but I do mind
| working all day.
|
| Yeah, I've basically moved on from anything that isn't Caprover
| + Portainer. Fuck the rest.
| utxaa wrote:
| this is why if you don't enjoy leet puzzles, you don't learn
| anything, or can't even do them.
| mancerayder wrote:
| I'm struggling with this. Manager managing more and more
| people. Old school on premmy turned AWS and Kubernetes while I
| was already manager a few years ago, making it hard to learn
| first principles of k8s and Docker.
|
| Now here I sit, Sunday, staring at a terminal window to force
| myself to set up a ruby on rails app on Docker so I can shove
| it into a EKS setup I will set up with Terraform.
|
| Could I do this at work? Yes. Except No. In the hours of 'free
| time' between meetings and other work, I feel too mentally
| foggy to play and learn new things.
|
| Please.Help.Me.
|
| I think I just need a vacation.
| rhn_mk1 wrote:
| There is a sweet spot somewhere between the extreme of not
| using pre-built tools and drowning in them.
|
| I've been following a similar path: automation and testing give
| me certainty and peace of mind when I'm working on bigger
| teams, so they should also improve my personal projects, right?
|
| Well, the difference is that my personal projects are used only
| by me in limited ways, and I also don't have to worry that
| someone will break the build when I'm not looking. So the extra
| work making things super safe would not pay off that much.
|
| Except when I feel I'm losing grip on what I'm doing, either
| from having to cover many use cases, not being experienced,
| unstable dependencies, or risk of data loss. That's when I set
| up CI pipelines for my personal projects.
| ryandrake wrote:
| Every third party tool (or library dependency, by the way) is
| something that will have to be well understood, maintained
| and fixed when broken. Which is why I try to avoid them for
| the most part in my personal _and work_ projects.
|
| When someone at work says "Hey, lets just use Xyz package I
| found online! It does just what we want!" you need to ask:
| Who fixes it when it causes a problem that stops us from
| shipping? Who does the security audit? What data does it
| collect, and to where does it send that data? What will
| adding it do to our software's performance? Who decides when
| to update it to the next version and verifies compatibility?
| Is its license compatible with our workflow/software?
|
| All of a sudden, people are less excited about that great
| doodad they found on StackOverflow! I'm always troubled by
| the cavalier attitude about relying on external tools and
| library dependencies. Yolo just pull it in! In some cases it
| might be the right decision, but not always. And, avoiding
| third party stuff is not always just blind NIH mentality:
| There are costs to depending on someone else for your
| project.
| goguy wrote:
| If you use third party libs with the appropriate licence
| then your the one that fixes it, just the same as if you
| rolled your own.
| zajio1am wrote:
| If you rolled your own, you invest your time to learn
| about the problem domain. If you use third party libs,
| you invest your time to learn about its
| interface/behavior. That is usually much more ephemeral
| knowledge. It is good tradeoff if the library does some
| heavy lifting, but that is not always true.
| nly wrote:
| The cost of the alternative : doing it yourself, is also
| often underestimated.
|
| "It's just a simple JSON parser, we can write our own" is a
| dismissal that can sink you down a rabbit hole of bugs and
| future technical debt.
|
| The most important thing about using a third party library
| is that its easy to replace with another one if it doesn't
| work out.
|
| Don't let third party data types or dependencies leak out
| of the module where you use them, for example via an API,
| and things go a lot smoother
| shawnz wrote:
| I strongly agree that bringing in new dependencies is not a
| small consideration. But at the same time, third-party
| dependencies will always be necessary and by carefully
| choosing those that are best suited for the job, you might
| be able to get a net reduction in complexity.
|
| Old, established third-party dependencies are not
| necessarily better for the job than new, trendy
| dependencies. Their entrenched nature can be an advantage
| and also a limitation. And when you roll it yourself, then
| that is of course the newest and least established solution
| of all.
| ta1234567890 wrote:
| Reminds me of this slime mold video:
| https://youtu.be/GwKuFREOgmo
|
| The mold "operates" in roughly two modes: exploring and
| exploiting. It explores to find the food and then it exploits
| the best paths to the food to consume it.
|
| I feel our minds work in a similar way, we explore when
| learning new stuff and then we exploit when using what we
| learned to accomplish something.
|
| Probably most of the work that majority of people do is mostly
| exploiting previously learned stuff, with some limited
| exploration sprinkled into it every now and then.
| schindlabua wrote:
| Hah sounds like you described me perfectly. But I do have to
| say, ever since I'm programming full-time I seem not to be able
| to just code for fun anymore.
|
| I used to program all day long.. and I guess I still do, but
| now it's for work, and after 8h of work I'm just done, you
| know? The "stuff I want to look at" list is growing longer and
| longer and there's no hope of me ever catching up.
|
| (I can't imagine how it is for people with kids. How do you get
| anything done in your private life at all?)
| Netcob wrote:
| When things are kinda slow and aimless at work, that's when I
| really start to do some projects at home again. But to be
| honest, it all comes and goes.
|
| But yeah, right now I'm both single and in lockdown, and if
| it was any other way I wouldn't spend a week just programming
| some sort of custom build/deployment agent.
|
| With kids? One of my colleagues once told me that once you
| have them, you'll suddenly be out of time you didn't even
| know you had in the first place.
| hibbelig wrote:
| I found that the kids running to you and jumping up and down
| and demanding your attention is an extremely quick way to
| reset. After an hour or so you completely forgot about work.
| noisy_boy wrote:
| Speaking as a person with kids, I get into many things but
| with exceptions of very simple/small stuff, mostly nothing
| gets done and there are lots of stuff in various stages of
| incompleteness. It also depends on your level of
| procrastinating. Doing all these things also has an effect on
| sleep because I only get time once everyone has gone to bed.
| CalRobert wrote:
| Dad of two - we basically don't, if I'm honest. I've had to
| give up on an immense number of things and while lots of
| people tell you "having kids is expensive" very few will tell
| you that the most expensive part is the opportunity cost. I
| have so many things I want to do and it hurts, almost
| physically, to watch other people doing them because they
| could hack on stuff after work while I had to deal with
| making sure a 3 year old wiped their butt OK or get yelled at
| because they actually wanted a _different_ spoon.
|
| Now, it turns out my career was lacklustre, so no great loss,
| and I'm sure having older kids is different than mine (1 and
| 3) but right now I get make 40-60 minutes a day to do what I
| want. Not much time for a side gig. I'm writing this right
| now with my kid watching a cartoon next to me when I
| originally wanted to work on some UI stuff for a side
| project, because I'm exhausted. Speaking of the above, she's
| scratching her butt so maybe we need to discuss the
| importance of thorough wiping.
| pbronez wrote:
| I'm right there with you man. Same ages even.
|
| The first few years of kids were infuriating and
| terrifying. I built my career by constantly exploring and
| learning after hours. Kids made that impossible, and that
| made me frustrated (because there's SO MUCH I want to do
| besides diapers) and scared (because how can I maintain my
| career without learning).
|
| It's somewhat better now. I'm seeing them grow and can
| believe that this stage of life won't last forever. I've
| managed to keep up with work by increasing efficiency
| during core hours, though I still look forward to getting
| back on the wagon with side projects when I can.
|
| Here are a few beliefs that have helped me build & maintain
| a positive mind set:
|
| - An engaged parent is priceless to a child. They
| desperately need you and you are irreplaceable. There is
| huge value in showing up for them, it's just very different
| from your prior experience.
|
| - COVID is terrible and we're all struggling to get by. You
| must ruthlessly prioritize where you spend mental,
| physical, fiscal and chronological resources. Nobody
| expects you to maintain the same pace as before; we are all
| suffering through this together.
|
| - Family and Profession both benefit from strengthening
| your mind, body and habits. Level up your time management
| game to improve exercise and diet. When the kids get
| easier, you'll have more capacity for professional
| endeavors than before.
| CalRobert wrote:
| All true, and there are days I'm writing posts more like
| yours than mine. But today was hard.
|
| A lot of it is fear - I honestly don't know if I can
| compete with people who can work all weekend or put in
| late nights.
| earhart wrote:
| FWIW - in my experience, if their demands upset you, it's
| not going to go well (you'll get more demands and feel more
| exhausted); if you laugh at the ridiculousness of the
| situation, remind them to ask nicely, and still help them
| with what they need/want, you'll be much less stressed,
| you'll be teaching them that being unpleasant doesn't
| bother you and doesn't help but does have the natural
| consequences of slowing down what they want, and you'll be
| teaching them a better way of being; at least with my own
| kids, they picked up on it pretty quickly, and they started
| being much more fun to hang out with.
|
| (Good luck!)
| CalRobert wrote:
| True, and oddly given my comment, I adore them and love
| being their dad. But they destroyed my old life so I've
| had to build a new one around them. The pandemic hasn't
| helped.
| mehphp wrote:
| You either don't or you have to sacrifice sleep, leisure time
| or something else.
|
| I have a full-time job, two-kids and a small SaaS side-
| business and it is all consuming.
|
| I either get up early or stay up late to work on my own
| stuff.
|
| The goal is to transition into working for myself but that is
| going slowly and I've been at it for a while so I'm feeling a
| bit burned out lately...
|
| Thoughts of just selling the damn thing and just working my
| 9-5 are becoming more frequent...
| nthj wrote:
| I don't mean to stick my nose in, but seeing as we are on
| HN: I keep hearing the market is pretty good for capital
| lately, have you explored raising a round to accelerate
| dropping the 9-5?
| fulafel wrote:
| Get a job where you can use part of your time to look at cool
| stuff. With some luck you may already have one.
| piva00 wrote:
| I don't know how old you are and for how long you've been
| programming but your experience mimics my progression.
|
| I started playing with some kind of programming when I was
| about 9-10, BASIC on a MSX and later HTML that opened up me
| for web development on ASP 3.0 and PHP at the time.
|
| It was a very big hobby when I was young and turned into a
| career when I was pretty young, about 16. It stayed as a
| hobby for another 9-10 years but I got to the point where
| thinking about programming outside of my paid time was
| exhausting...
|
| It helped me tremendously, I would never have a career if I
| wasn't extremely curious about programming for 15-20 years of
| my life, I just got to the same stage as you did.
|
| There is an evergrowing and endless list of things I want to
| learn and experience, staying on top of the latest tech on my
| own free time is just too costly nowadays. I still do it,
| when I need it for work and during work hours, and all the
| accumulated experience helps me to figure out things way
| faster so I don't need to use my free time to catch up.
| Increasingly rarely I get that curiosity again, to use my
| free time to study something work-related. When I do it
| nowadays it's for much larger and abstract concepts such as
| organisation culture and change, team spirit and building
| trust and effective communication.
|
| I noticed that the past 5 years of my career has been much
| more about the human and social aspect of work rather than
| technical ones. And I didn't try to become a manager, tech
| lead or product owner, it has just attracted me as I think I
| always got attracted to gaps of efficiency at work. It seems
| that seeing this human aspect of work brought me closer to
| more human aspects of life (arts, music, sociology) and a bit
| away from controlling the machine I learned when I was a kid.
| jameshush wrote:
| This resonates with me too. Instead of spending 2 weeks
| shaving off 100ms in a request I'll spend two weeks shaving
| off 3-4 days worth of time for a request from the marketing
| or sales team by figuring out a better process for them to
| request changes on the management side.
| motiejus wrote:
| I do have small children, and, for like many others, I get to
| do my things when everyone are asleep. You seem to have
| interest (which means you have energy), but the problem seems
| to be finishing. I have the same issue.
|
| I am maintaining a list of them in a notebook, and am trying
| to limit the number of them to not more than 8-10 at the same
| time. And I can only start a new one if I finish an old one.
|
| Everything in that list is a task with a clear Definition Of
| Done, so I know when I can cross them out. Realistically,
| each of them would take from 4 hours to a week (assuming
| full-time). Over the years, many things got done. Slower than
| I'd like, surely, but I think a SaaS business will come out
| of those TODOs in a few years.
|
| This way, things are moving forward (since I must complete
| something), but I am allowing myself freedom to switch
| effortlessly. That motivates to do *something* when the hour
| comes. :)
| SanderNL wrote:
| As a father of two I can relate with some of the answers
| here, but I'd like to add an alternative viewpoint here just
| to give young dads some glimmer of hope.
|
| For the first and a half or so we've had a difficult life
| with the first kid. To be honest, there is just no way around
| it. Especially your first kid. The SEAL-level sleep
| deprivation and complete lack of "me time" really takes it
| toll. I'm also not the type of dad to let mom handle
| everything. She also has a career and, to be honest, a better
| one too. So I was regularly up at 2AM, 4AM and 6AM. Then a
| workday. :) (If you have young parents around you, please try
| to be compassionate.)
|
| But for some reason I'm more effective now than I ever was. I
| can remember "not having enough energy" to complete some
| project for as long as I am alive - even when I was alone. It
| is clear to me this had very little to do with my actual life
| and more with my attitude. My life is more complex and
| demanding than it used to be but somehow I still managed to
| lose 60lbs, learned to read Latin, took guitar lessons and
| started a business. Every single one of these items never
| would have left my todo list without my family. They have
| endowed me with a keen sense of priority which made planning
| my life quite easy to be honest.
|
| I know those achievements I listed are not that hard, but for
| me they are significant. I've found most things in life don't
| require your eternal soul as a sacrifice, they just take
| (usually a lot of) time and so you need to be strategic about
| your goals. Take it slow, don't burn yourself out, but also
| don't stray from left to right unnecessarily. Keep your eyes
| on the ball. Don't shift from "write a compiler", "read
| latin", "write toy OS", "build cpu from nand-gates" to "learn
| german" and back to "learn to draw realistically" in a month.
| Focus. A dirty word, I know, but a powerful one.
| pomian wrote:
| An aside for future or present dad's (and all Parents.) There
| is so much joy and learning that happens with raising kids,
| that I think the secret is not fight it, but enjoy it. Almost
| sounds cliche, but embrace the experience. From the very
| beginning to when they are adults, to experience a window
| into your own life, a window into the world. These windows
| allow you to explore your surroundings and relationships with
| a different eye, with more understanding. The best way to get
| into that zone, is to forget your own desires for a bit,
| forget your schedule. Just live in the moment of the kid (s).
| After you relax a bit, and surrender to their schedule, then
| all of a sudden you find opportunities for your time in
| between. But with passion and effectiveness. As mentioned
| below in a comment, you can be more focused, I believe
| because you are more relaxed. If you fight all the time to
| make 'your' schedule fit, you become frustrated. As you let
| go, you find a schedule that works, and with enthusiasm for
| that time to create and build. Cherish the moment with the
| kids, everything from diaper changing to eating, because they
| are a reflective window on your own soul, and a fresh mirror
| to the insanity if the world around you.
| moldavi wrote:
| How do you let go of the things you want to do? I like to
| think that my side project is something only I could do,
| that the world needs but doesnt know it yet... so the
| thought of giving it up sends chills through me.
|
| You seem to have a really nice outlook on things so I'd
| really appreciate any hints on how to reconcile this and
| get to where you are! (I dont have any kids yet)
| MattRix wrote:
| You can still do side projects when you've got kids. You
| just have to treat your priorities seriously, which
| usually means having to give up most of the
| netflix/social-media time. You also have to realize that
| in a two parent household, you don't usually need both
| parents looking after the kids, and it's better for both
| of you if you take turns (for your sanity AND for your
| free time).
| moldavi wrote:
| That sounds pretty promising. Does taking turns work well
| in practice?
| MattRix wrote:
| It can, but it really depends on the personalities of you
| and your partner. It works best if your partner also has
| some independent work they need to get done (or enjoy
| doing, ex a hobby).
| ativzzz wrote:
| For the vast, vast, majority of us, nothing that we do
| individually is important. Sure we work and provide some
| value to somebody somewhere, but if we didn't exist or
| didn't do that job, the world wouldn't be any worse off.
|
| If you think otherwise, it's probably your ego lying to
| you.
| anonymouse008 wrote:
| And even still for those "others" - nothing individually
| they do is that important, it's how the team they've
| assembled operates when the leader isn't around... and as
| much as a belief system can anchor people into habits and
| behaviors, it's still the deputies or vps of a cause that
| must maintain consistency in purpose...
|
| That's a long winded way of saying, no ones individual
| contributions are that important... it's only through the
| concert of others that any person reaches those heights.
| asoneth wrote:
| In talking with fellow parents of young children the biggest
| variable seems to be whether there is a stay-at-home parent,
| live-in relative, or nanny who can help with the recurring
| labor required to run a household like cleaning, cooking,
| shopping, bills, repairs, yard work, taxes, etc. Otherwise
| that work piles up until after the kids go to sleep and on
| weekends.
|
| You can sacrifice sleep, but that's not sustainable for
| everyone.
|
| My partner and I block out a couple hours each week for the
| other to wrangle the kids so we can work on our various
| hobbies/projects. I've found that when I work on my computer-
| based hobbies I usually end up frittering away half the time
| reading online news whereas outdoor construction, yard, and
| bike projects don't seem to suffer from that so they end up
| making more progress.
|
| Hopefully in ~5 yrs I can actually do some of these things
| with the kids and it'll get a little easier.
| Iv wrote:
| > How do you get anything done in your private life at all?
|
| We don't. It sucks. And if we ever mention the impact of
| having a kid on our quality of life it makes us bad parents
| and terrible persons.
|
| I should have resisted more about having a kid. I am happy we
| made only one.
| SamPatt wrote:
| Is your child still young?
|
| Because as children age you're able to reclaim some of your
| life back. At least, if you don't fall into the trap of
| them living a packed schedule themselves.
|
| I've got three, the eldest is now old enough to babysit the
| rest if needed. With a consistent bedtime and family nearby
| to care for them on occasion, my wife and I do get some
| spare time. We mostly choose to spend that together but we
| can pursue our own hobbies also.
| Iv wrote:
| 7. Yes I know, it gets better. That's still going to be
| 10 years off my already too short life.
|
| And how I envy the idea that living close to family would
| save you time instead of draining some.
| MattRix wrote:
| As a parent of two kids who are both past that age, I
| feel like your perspective on this is all wrong. You've
| given 70+ years to someone else. And you haven't lost
| those years at all, since presumably you also have a
| meaningful day job (and if not, that's not your child's
| fault).
|
| It sounds like you and your partner should work on
| splitting the load more. You don't need both parents to
| look after the kid constantly, you can often take turns.
| Kids can also watch TV and all kinds of stuff. They also
| have earlier bedtimes, giving you even more free time.
| localhost wrote:
| I can't agree more! I make the same argument, but much less
| eloquently than you did "I just randomly got interested in this
| particular topic and decided to play aorund with it".
|
| Using the same motivation: "let's play with things and see what
| I can figure out", I created a video [1] where I figure out
| what I need to do to create a silly version of the cat command
| that prints text out upside-down.
|
| I did it for a bunch of reasons: figuring out how to replace
| system commands, learning a bit more about Unicode, trying out
| our C extension for VS Code, learning the process for building
| YouTube video (which was a very deep rabbit hole) ... all to
| produce a single video. It was fun, scratched an itch that I've
| had for a while that I'll continue to work on.
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OJ2ivP2llFs
| fuzzy2 wrote:
| Hm, it's different for me. Since at work I don't really do the
| Continuous Integration/Delivery stuff (or anything with "real
| infrastructure"), I find it very enjoyable to fiddle with it at
| home. There's no pressure to accomplish anything and I can just
| leave it alone for months or even years before coming back to
| it.
|
| There's a nice side-effect, too: The CI definition documents
| how to compile the project. I recently dug out an old LaTeX
| "project" and there was nothing, no Makefile or anything. Had
| to look up everything again to get it to run (with XeLaTeX and
| Biber).
| majewsky wrote:
| > There's a nice side-effect, too: The CI definition
| documents how to compile the project.
|
| Okay, sure, but that's not an argument for CI. That's an
| argument for a Makefile.
|
| In fact, I find myself going back to Makefiles all the time
| not in spite of all these specialized build tools, but
| _because of them_. Even if the steps are straight-forward for
| someone who 's familiar with the tools, just having a
| Makefile there in the repository root will be helpful
| documentation to help someone new (or myself in 2 years) get
| started with how to build the stuff. For example, for LaTeX,
| it could be something like: build: slides.pdf
| handout.pdf %.pdf: %.tex pdflatex $*
| pdflatex $*
| NBJack wrote:
| I would caution against trusting your build process
| definition to hold up to time. It's definitely better than
| nothing.
|
| Even within the last few years of my job, we've had numerous
| disruptions to our automated builds due to everything from
| repo changes to version bumps in our fundamental deploy
| tools. I've got a self-assigned action to take just tomorrow
| due to how a change in how secrets management has now
| disrupted our performance testing process available to devs.
| Anecdotally, it seems more and more that as newer build tools
| move forward, they rarely seem to prioritize compatibility
| with existing methods (I'm looking at you, k8s, and your API
| versioning; "where feasible" turned out to be a loose
| definition).
| fuzzy2 wrote:
| It may not run to completion in the future, that's true.
| However, if it's something as simple as a shell script or a
| shell command list, it's at least relatively transparent.
|
| Unlike, say, tasks on Azure DevOps. Not a fan of those.
| spion wrote:
| It also really depends on what you find cool, there are
| different ways to look at things. For example if I think of
| pipelines as these execution graphs that run on their own and
| make sure your artifacts end up in the right place, then its
| really fun. CI systems that visualize this make it even more
| interesting.
|
| A little combination of the right personal interests and
| perspective goes a long way towards building up resilience to
| deal with the ugly bits.
| Netcob wrote:
| I had this interesting experience back in university. We
| were doing some simple web service project in pairs, and it
| consisted of a program and some devops stuff. My partner in
| that project turned out to have skills that exactly
| complemented my own - he had trouble with the algorithmic
| stuff that I thought was trivial, yet he easily stitched
| all the services together by editing some configuration
| files before I even understood what any of them were for.
| void_mint wrote:
| For me, true programming joy comes from not having to look at
| docs. To be able to just write code for long periods of time,
| without running into something weird happening with a library
| or tool is the "zen" feeling that I hear lots of others talk
| about.
|
| At work, and in this domain:
|
| > I wanted to learn some new frameworks and concepts to help
| with that, and I decided to make my personal projects a bit
| more "professional". Use continuous integration, focus more on
| web stuff, build and automatically deploy containers and so on.
|
| It's all docs. It's all "This thing was supposed to happen but
| ____ didn't do what I expected". Fighting with tools and
| configuration and triggers and stuff like that is the opposite
| of zen.
| kkylin wrote:
| For anyone interested: the physical phenomenon is spin-orbit
| coupling. Here's a somewhat technical discussion of the classical
| version:
|
| https://mitpress-request.mit.edu/sites/default/files/titles/...
|
| and the quantum analog:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spin%E2%80%93orbit_interaction
| throwaway823882 wrote:
| My favorite problems to solve are the ones I don't need to.
| tjoff wrote:
| Love it, but for more context, when was this? How accomplished
| was he at that time?
| rzzzt wrote:
| Not an answer to your question, but the meta-context is
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26931021 (probably)
| Rerarom wrote:
| 1946-7, just after his Manhattan Project work, before his work
| on quantum electrodynamics.
| waihtis wrote:
| There is power in the startup/business world also in doing things
| that aren't immediately sensible or predictable. Read Rory
| Sutherland's "Alchemy" for learning more.
| sideshowb wrote:
| True perhaps but if you're doing it because there is "power" in
| it, that paradoxically defeats the object.
| waihtis wrote:
| Consider it rather an excuse to have fun, and a feasible
| explanation if you have to explain yourself to anyone (boss,
| investors)
| dang wrote:
| Some past threads:
|
| _Feynman: I am burned out and I 'll never accomplish anything_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10585890 - Nov 2015 (22
| comments)
|
| _Feynman: I am burned out and I 'll never accomplish anything_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3874875 - April 2012 (66
| comments)
|
| _Feynman 's wobbling plate: how to recover from burnout_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2291773 - March 2011 (22
| comments)
| zeeshanqureshi wrote:
| "Blocked by Intention" is what the mystics (eastern, sufi, hindu
| etc.) call this.
|
| John Cleese's book[1] and lecture[2] on creativity also have some
| thoughts on this.
|
| [1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/50719532-creativity
|
| [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pb5oIIPO62g
| jmfldn wrote:
| "The diagrams and the whole business that I got the Nobel Prize
| for came from that piddling around with the wobbling plate."
|
| This shows the extreme importance of blue sky thinking and
| allowing people to follow their whims sometimes rather than not
| starting something unless it fits into existing research goals
| and funding. This breakthrough all lead from an observation that
| had no apparent use beyond fulfilling a whim and to have fun with
| it.
|
| I try to live my life by the ludic principle of 'playing'. It's
| honestly been the lifeblood that's fueled me, kept me sane at
| work and allowed me to do OK in my career. All of my best ideas
| at work and in things like making music came from this spirit I'm
| convinced.
| nicbou wrote:
| I learned my trade by playing. I suspect that many other people
| on HN also did. Now I do something very different, and that
| also came from playing, as did many of the skills that made it
| possible.
|
| I still write code, but it's entirely for fun. It's a
| completely different experience from closing tickets in an
| office.
|
| I do many other things that aren't very cost-effective, just
| because they're fun. They might not pay the rent, but they keep
| me sane enough to do the things that do. For Mr. Feynman it was
| playing the bongos.
|
| Do things that don't matter. Aside from the doors it can
| unlock, it's just damn fun.
| mmcnl wrote:
| You could argue that having fun is the end goal of things.
| Why do we do things that we consider important? Why is it
| important? Somewhere down the line everything we do should
| enable someone having fun. If not, then why bother?
| visarga wrote:
| > Why do we do things that we consider important?
|
| Fundamentally, to survive. To self replicate. We're self
| replicators.
| visarga wrote:
| > Do things that don't matter. Aside from the doors it can
| unlock, it's just damn fun.
|
| I found this discussion about open-endedness being very
| illuminating about doing stuff that are just fun. A revolt
| against objectives.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lhYGXYeMq_E&t=2192s
| agumonkey wrote:
| I wonder how much is made by very simple emotions:
|
| - playing - competition - noble obligations (helping someone
| else)
|
| I keep looking at adult life in dismay because what people
| consider work would barely amount to 20 minutes of soccer
| when we were kids. We used to run wild for hours, hurt
| ourselves, attempt everything that could work and we kept
| asking for more. Can we plug that back into daily adult jobs
| ?
| klondike_klive wrote:
| We can get you another beanbag for the breakout area...
| nicbou wrote:
| I really wish there was a PE class for adult, where you
| stretch, run around the track, then play some random sport
| for about an hour. One day it's cops and robbers, another
| it's grass hockey, and nobody knows in advance.
| kirse wrote:
| _Do things that don 't matter._
|
| I've been thinking about this recently and realized that my
| brain is capable of drawing an incorrect conclusion about the
| "mattering-ness" of something based on limited data,
| typically a feeling arising from personal values.
|
| The thing is, everything we do _does_ matter, and it 's one
| of the reasons why the Bible instructs us to "walk by faith,
| not by sight". On the cosmic scale of things, we don't have
| all the information to truly calculate whether something does
| (or does not) matter. In that regard, choosing to live _as
| if_ what we do always matters seems like the preferred and
| life-giving approach.
| saalweachter wrote:
| You can't really make a learning system that doesn't play.
|
| Physical play is how we train, develop and calibrate our
| bodies; mental play does the same for our minds.
|
| If we one day build AGI that doesn't skip and dance and draw
| and make up silly stories for the fun of it, that will
| surprise me a lot more than the other way around.
| visarga wrote:
| > If we one day build AGI that doesn't skip and dance and
| draw and make up silly stories for the fun of it, that will
| surprise me a lot more than the other way around.
|
| I agree, it would be sad if AI wasn't able to play with
| human culture. Culture is crystallized intelligence.
| bserge wrote:
| It wouldn't need to skip and dance, though. Mental play is
| just randomly trying to piece together different
| information and see the results (physical play is simpler,
| a subset of mental play, basically continuous calibration).
|
| It's like having 12 puzzle sets and just taking pieces from
| each, trying to fit them with others and seeing the
| results. Sometimes something interesting shows up.
|
| Our brains do it constantly, all the time, 24/7. Most often
| the results are garbage and discarded, but sometimes
| something interesting/useful comes out, so it's tagged as
| such and stored for further processing.
|
| The data used for such play is _everything_ we have stored
| in memory, recalled either randomly or, more often, based
| on current circumstances /needs/wants.
|
| An AGI would only play with what it has. And what it has
| available would be up to the creators.
|
| If it's built to imitate a human, it will have to be loaded
| with the same data as a human. And I mean _all_ of it,
| everything from birth to current age or death (that varies
| a lot by individual, by the way).
|
| Basically, you'd have to recreate a whole human life's
| experience for this hypothetical AGI. Otherwise it won't be
| even close to a human.
|
| But such an advanced AI would most likely be built for
| specific purposes, which would save a lot of resources. It
| can play all it wants with that limited data, improve it
| and create new stuff. But it won't be able to do things
| like applying information from bird flight to car building,
| because it will simply not have that data.
|
| Just my musings.
| mmcnl wrote:
| Not everybody is Feynman ofcourse. You have to accept the risk
| that giving freedom for creativity won't end up with anything
| useful.
| mikro2nd wrote:
| But you'll still end up having fun. So a win, whatever the
| "outcome". (If such a thing matters then you're probably not
| at play.)
| jmfldn wrote:
| True. I think most people can benefit from a bit of this at
| least. Ie. Speaking of software engineering, at work our 10%
| time is for us to do as we please. A lot of good things come
| from that. Maybe 50% time would be too much for most though.
| Google's 20% is probably the maximum I'd opt for if I were a
| CEO.
| mmcnl wrote:
| For me setting 10% aside as "do as you please" feels like a
| restriction on creativity as well. It's hard to "plan"
| creativity. I think culture and trust is much more
| important than setting a number.
| jmfldn wrote:
| I agree about culture and trust, both crucial in this
| regard. I think something like 10% time can play a part
| too, it at least gives people the feeling they can do
| what they want for a fixed period of time.
| oytis wrote:
| Well, apart from being playful you also need to be a person who
| can figure out the equation for water funnel effortlessly as a
| high school kid. The rest of us can benefit from forcing
| oneself to intellectual effort
| Kinrany wrote:
| > When I was in high school, I'd see water running out of a
| faucet growing narrower, and wonder if I could figure out
| what determines that curve. I found it was rather easy to do.
|
| Wait, is this caused merely by the water being accelerated by
| gravity?
|
| I bet most people would be able to figure out the equations
| for that if they got interested.
|
| Edit: there's a separate thread
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26931645
| jmfldn wrote:
| To win a nobel prize yes, but anyone can benefit from the
| general attitude in many domains of life.
| Stevvo wrote:
| You also need tenure, more than anything else.
| jmfldn wrote:
| "You also need tenure, more than anything else."
|
| Sadly yes. An argument that the current uni system should
| be changed to make this not so.
| Broken_Hippo wrote:
| That just can't happen, though. Part of tenure is having
| experience and being able to draw from that. It isn't
| just job experience, either: Life experience counts and
| can give your different ways to think outside of the box.
|
| The best example I can give is art related: Documentaries
| and other non-art learning puts a variety of concepts and
| ideas in your brain, making it easier to think of
| creative concepts for artwork.
|
| The process takes time, though, more time than can be
| reasonably stuffed into getting a degree.
| ridaj wrote:
| The uni system couldn't afford to give tenured professors
| freedom to follow their fancy without the "underclass"
| working hard to make it possible in the first place --
| graduate students and untenured staff do the high-volume
| work needed to make profits: churning out tens of
| thousands of undergrads per year, paid for by fed-backed
| loans, and definitely not all of them taught by Feynman-
| type professors.
|
| I don't know if that's true, that's just my model of how
| American university works.
| jmfldn wrote:
| Sure. I just wonder if there is some sort of middle
| ground? Does it have to be zero sum here between tenured
| and non-tenured in this regard? I'm not sure what the
| answer is but other setups are possible unless you
| consider this one optimal (perhaps some do!).
| bloopy123 wrote:
| This is a good example of how you can escape from procrastination
| too.
|
| And I think also a reason why so many side projects go
| unfinished.
|
| It's also an interesting phenomenon i realized whereby when you
| are working full time you long for time to work full time on a
| clever idea you have. But when you have time to work on this idea
| full time you don't want to do it. But then the feeling returns
| when you again don't have time to work on it.
|
| I realized that working on something for fun can help you segue
| back into what you should be working on.
|
| But it seems it only works as long as you don't have grand plans
| for it becoming a business or a great industry-changing
| discovery. You must maintain that it's only for fun. To see what
| can be done.
|
| I like the word "play" vs "work on".
| Trex_Egg wrote:
| >> It's also an interesting phenomenon i realized whereby when
| you are working full time you long for time to work full time
| on a clever idea you have. But when you have time to work on
| this idea full time you don't want to do it. But then the
| feeling returns when you again don't have time to work on it.
| --I totally get this feel(of procrastination on things) in all
| of my endeavors. I will try to work only for fun to get on with
| it. Is there any element that might sustain fun for the very
| end or any other secret sauce to it?
| morelandjs wrote:
| Just a shoutout to Greg Kilcup whose page this is posted on, and
| who's another incredible physicist and fascinating personality.
| juancn wrote:
| I makes me think about how I approach really difficult problems.
| I use a strategy that I call: "obsess and let go" that has worked
| wonders for me.
|
| Essentially it has two parts:
|
| - obsession: look at the problem intently, poke it, prod it,
| think about experiments, talk to other people until you're
| completely blocked and making absolutely no progress.
|
| - letting go: forget about it, go do something else, exercise,
| take a vacation, paint, attack a different problem, go to a bar,
| whatever makes you let go (truly let go).
|
| Eventually, as if by magic, at some unknowable time later (could
| be days or years), while doing something else the beginning of
| solution pops into consciousness, like a thread that needs to be
| pulled and as if by magic the whole problem untangles.
|
| I have no clue why this works (I assume the subconscious part of
| the brain never really lets go after a good obsessive phase), but
| it does work more often than not.
|
| The hard part is dealing with outside expectations.
| robocat wrote:
| Similar to "You have to keep a dozen of your favorite problems
| constantly present in your mind, although by and large, they
| will lay in a dormant state. Every time you hear read a new
| trick or a new result, test it against each of your 12 problems
| to see whether it helps. Every once in a while there will be a
| hit and people will say "How did he do it. He must be a
| genius." - Richard Feynman
| noisy_boy wrote:
| Most of the stuff I have learned well were a combination of them
| fitting into the need for automation and sufficient time/lack of
| pressure/deadlines. I personally find deadlines suffocating but
| sadly that is how most things are.
| paulpauper wrote:
| This guy was so smart he could observe a physical phenomena and
| then quickly derive the equation that underlies is. damn
| [deleted]
| debrice wrote:
| You've got one and only life, do what you love. Life has a fun
| way to reward the bolds
| bradmcgo wrote:
| Couldn't agree more. It can be scary at times, but at least
| you'll feel intrinsically at ease.
| tdhz77 wrote:
| Not all passions, pursuits and energy return Nobel Prizes.
| Something to be mindful of when reading too far into this. Still,
| I learn things that are interesting to me and sometimes I get
| lucky and people want to pay me and other times a new technology
| comes out and I wasted a few good years. Since I'm making my
| decisions on what to learn, it doesn't seem like wasted time, but
| rather a shit ton of fun.
| jacobmischka wrote:
| I read (listened to, technically) this book a few weeks ago
| because I've always been inspired by the idea of Feynman and
| didn't know much about him. Honestly, I actually like him less
| after having read it.
|
| As I guess I should have expected, because its subtitle is
| "Adventures of a Curious Character", it's unfortunately for me
| filled with many more random personal anecdotes, often involving
| naked women, prostitutes, gambling, or topless bars. There are
| some rather more scientific and aspirational anecdotes like the
| one linked here, and certainly it's beneficial to learn about a
| man as a whole and not deify him as a scientific god. However I
| cracked it open hoping to read about nothing but neat ideas he
| had and what drove him, not read about some rather shameless
| guy's strange happenings.
|
| I guess I wouldn't say I recommend against reading it, but I
| wouldn't get your hopes up before doing so like I did.
| practicalpants wrote:
| I don't think Feynman was that different in this masculine or
| promiscuous respect from many of that era's greats...
| Schrodinger, von Neumann, Einstein, to name a few.
|
| Feynman at least writes extensively about his deceased wife.
|
| I imagine you would not enjoy reading history too much as the
| 21st C Western first world attitudes on these topics are pretty
| unique compared to any other time.
| jacobmischka wrote:
| I do enjoy reading history, and I'm not even turned off by
| knowing that he did and enjoyed those things. I just got
| tired of listening about it for what seemed like about half
| of the book when I was expecting a memoir of a Nobel prize
| winning scientist.
| baremetal wrote:
| surely youre joking...
| seoaeu wrote:
| Those other scientists didn't coerce any of their female
| graduate students to pose naked so they could practice for
| their painting hobby.
| paulpauper wrote:
| Dirac was purpotedly very on-point
| svat wrote:
| One thing to remember about this book that is easy to miss is
| that it's not a memoir or autobiography in the usual sense. You
| may have seen this book, and its sequel, _What Do You Care What
| Other People Think?_ , described as being "by Richard Feynman
| and Ralph Leighton" or "edited by Ralph Leighton" or "as told
| to Ralph Leighton". It turns out that it was not written as a
| book, but his friend Ralph Leighton (son of the physicist
| Robert B. Leighton) took several hours of (recorded)
| conversations with Feynman talking to him, and selected parts
| of them to go into the book.
|
| So although the book is sold as "by Richard Feynman" (which is
| true in some sense: it's in the first person, published when he
| was still alive, and he really did say everything that's in the
| book), it would be more accurate to call it a book by Ralph
| Leighton, and an appropriate title may be "Things my friend
| Richard Feynman told me about himself that I thought were fun".
| (This also explains the subtitle "Adventures of a Curious
| Character"--this is not Feynman calling himself that, but
| Leighton describing his friend that way.)
|
| Now consider that (1) Ralph Leighton was not a physicist but
| Feynman's "close friend and drumming partner", and (2) Feynman
| was a natural conversationalist, automatically adapting his
| style depending on whom he was speaking to, whether it was a
| friend, or undergraduate physics students, or he was talking
| about computers to a New Age crowd at Esalen
| (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EKWGGDXe5MA), and you have
| this result. The friendly conversational style increases the
| appeal of the book and gives some insight into the speaker, but
| the technical detail of Feynman's core work, which was very
| important to him, gets diluted.
|
| (One of my professors disliked the book for giving the
| impression that you get a Nobel Prize just living a life of
| having fun and playing around, while in fact Feynman was known
| to work very hard, at all hours of day and night. He liked to
| re-derive by himself anything he learned till he was satisfied
| he understood it, and that took prodigious amounts of pen-and-
| paper calculation. This may partly be Feynman projecting an
| aura of effortless brilliance, but I think it's more likely a
| combination of the fact that hard work doesn't seem hard if you
| enjoy it enough, and that going in detail about how hard you
| worked does not make for very good conversation.)
|
| It is true that many memoirs are written this same way
| (dictating to someone else), but I think this book shows the
| effects more than most: including the selection of topics, as
| you observed.
|
| (BTW the audio material that went into the books is available
| too, as "The Feynman Tapes", and listening to it may give a
| different impression than listening to an audiobook of someone
| else reading the text of a book itself transcribed from audio:
| https://kongar-olondar.bandcamp.com/ )
| jacobmischka wrote:
| That explains a lot, I did not know that. Thank you, that
| changes my opinion a bit.
| Borrible wrote:
| Just read his lectures decades ago.
|
| So, he was an overall great guy, you say?
|
| And there is an audio book version of his illustrious
| escapades?
|
| Great, have to give it a try. Thank you!
| jacobmischka wrote:
| I might recommend actually reading it, the narration of the
| Audible recording at least wasn't spectacular.
| Borrible wrote:
| Ah, a pity.
|
| I love listen to audio books, but you're absolutely right,
| the narrator is sometimes more important than the
| narrative. Some gifted narrators probably could read out
| operating instructions of kichen machines and it would be
| entertaining.
|
| Thanks for the advice.
| otras wrote:
| If you're looking for a deeper look beyond the anecdotes, I'd
| recommend James Gleick's _Genius: The Life and Science of
| Richard Feynman_. It covers much more of the ideas he had and
| what drove him.
| P0l83q4p1Hw3Ul wrote:
| I like him more after reading it.
|
| All the stories had neat ideas, demonstrated his personality
| and showed what drove him. Of course it wasn't laid out
| directly in a boring technical book that no one is going to
| read.
|
| Also, what's up with people ignoring the fine line between
| crazy and genius, and thinking all these genius are supposed to
| be completely normal people?
| ip26 wrote:
| I don't think people expect them to be _normal_. But we hold
| these people up as our heroes. People aspire to be more like
| their heroes. So it comes as a shock when they learn their
| hero was a notorious philanderer, or terrible father, or
| chronically depressed, or self-aggrandizing.
|
| Personally, I'm unsettled by how often the kids of our heroes
| seem to wind up unsuccessful, unhappy and poorly adjusted.
|
| I've kind of lost interest in the unstable genius. I want to
| learn about the also-rans who made quiet but notable
| contributions while remaining happy & raising equally happy
| kids.
| hungryforcodes wrote:
| You definitely inspired me to read it now. The clockwork of
| Feynman's human and non geeky character is one of the most
| interesting things about him.
| 74d-fe6-2c6 wrote:
| His relationship with women seems pretty immature and very
| geeky to me.
| daukadolt wrote:
| Can you elaborate?
| 74d-fe6-2c6 wrote:
| Can you google "feynman quotes women"?
| klohto wrote:
| Why even state it then if you're not interested in
| continuing the discussion?
| 74d-fe6-2c6 wrote:
| It's a bit too obvious to have potential for a discussion
| ...
| chris_j wrote:
| What is it about those anecdotes that makes you like him less?
| UncleMeat wrote:
| Dude was smart, but definitely a sexist. He didn't believe
| that women would be as capable of doing physics and engaged
| in some really awful behaviors that were weird even at the
| time (having meetings at a strip club? asking to paint
| students in the nude? really?).
|
| The lockpicking stuff in "Surely..." is a really fun chapter
| but also makes it clear that Feynman does not actually care
| that much about inconveniencing others. It was a fun
| intellectual exercise but actually harmed other people, which
| is pretty shitty behavior.
|
| It is just a little hard to read a book when assholish
| behavior just shows up with such frequency. Feynman was a
| genius, a great storyteller, and a lot of the content in his
| books is fabulous. But some of the material sours it.
| pcthrowaway wrote:
| > He didn't believe that women would be as capable of doing
| physics
|
| Interesting, from having read about his sister[1] I really
| got the impression that this limiting belief was something
| he bucked heavily, despite having been explicitly taught
| women were incapable of science by their mother and
| grandmother:
|
| > Joan was an inquisitive child, and she exhibited an
| interest in understanding the natural world from an early
| age. However, her mother and grandmother both dissuaded her
| from pursuing science, since they believed that women's
| brains were not physically capable of understanding complex
| scientific concepts in the way that men's brains could.
| Despite this, her brother Richard always encouraged her to
| be curious about the universe. It was he who originally
| introduced young Joan to auroras when, one night, he coaxed
| her out of bed to witness the northern lights flickering
| above an empty golf course near their home
|
| [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joan_Feynman
| pfortuny wrote:
| I guess you do not go to a topless bar to pay respect to and
| trean women with equality and respect.
| jacobmischka wrote:
| I don't know, I don't disapprove of any of those things
| morally or anything, but it just got old eventually. As an
| example, somewhere in the later parts of the book he talks
| about a period where he starts painting, and very shortly
| afterward he starts trying to convince women to let him paint
| them nude, including a student at the institution where he
| was a professor.
|
| Again, I don't think there's anything wrong with nudity, or
| anything inherently sexual about nudity in art, or even
| anything morally wrong with the desire to see naked women.
| But by that point after some of his other stories I started
| to see him as a somewhat creepy dude and it just came off to
| me like, oh of course, shortly after taking up this
| interesting art form you'd go straight to using it as a
| reason to see naked women, typical Feynman.
|
| I don't think there's necessarily anything wrong with
| anything he did in any of his stories, all of the parties
| were consenting in them all, it just left an unpleasant taste
| in my mouth.
| chris_j wrote:
| Thanks for expanding. I had forgotten about the painting
| anecdote.
|
| As others have pointed out, a lot men in that era seemed
| similar in a way. I'd been assuming that going through all
| the changes that happened in the 60s as a middle aged man
| must have had a certain effect on them. Seeing expressions
| of sexuality go from being something very private,
| something to be ashamed of, to being something that the
| younger generation is much more open about.
|
| For example, I remember reading Asimov when I was a kid.
| His earlier books were all very buttoned up, with highly
| intellectual and in depth discussions of galactic politics
| or robots. Then his later books are full of sex. I gather
| that Asimov in his later years gained a reputation for
| being somewhat creepy too.
| mncharity wrote:
| IIRC Feynman both had a reputation for putting a lot of effort
| into crafting a persona, and later said he had been less than
| honest in the sexist stories. So perhaps they reflect a
| somewhat different mix of sins.
| nicbou wrote:
| Although I didn't approve of some of the things he did, his
| book ( _Surely You 're Joking, Mr. Feynman!_) made me want to
| branch out more, to approach the world with renewed curiosity.
| His book is a good reminder that there is more to life than
| your resume.
|
| I often find myself taking random detours like he did with the
| ants or the bongos.
| fctorial wrote:
| His ant experiments blew my mind. The only experiment I did
| with ants was rubbing my finger on their trail and then
| watching them wander around blindly for a minute or so.
| Yajirobe wrote:
| lmao. nerd
| StavrosK wrote:
| There is some pretty bad sexism in the book (because that era
| was sexist, I guess), but I think your comment goes too far the
| other way and treats sex as taboo. What's wrong with naked
| women, prostitutes, gambling and topless bars?
| jacobmischka wrote:
| Please see my other comment; I don't think there's anything
| wrong with them necessarily, I just didn't particularly enjoy
| reading about them and his behavior just seemed sleezy a lot
| of the time.
| StavrosK wrote:
| That's fair.
| kstenerud wrote:
| Or, just approach it with an open mind, as a window into small
| parts of a man's journey.
|
| The more you judge people, the less you'll enjoy the twists and
| turns of a human life.
| jacobmischka wrote:
| That's a better way of phrasing what I intended in my last
| sentence, go into it with an open mind. I was expecting
| differently, so I didn't enjoy it as much as I would have had
| I known ahead of time that it would be largely tangential to
| his scientific life.
| Dumblydorr wrote:
| I love those moments when you're warming up, getting into the
| work, you may hit that first snag or obstacle, but you
| reflexively enter play mode.
|
| Now you're practicing creatively, now you're finding out new
| features of your tools and packages and data. You're hacking in a
| new script, you're trying new ideas. You find the answer,bring it
| back in, integrate it. You click run, and it just works!! Yess!!
| hprotagonist wrote:
| _If you pay a man a salary for doing research, he and you will
| want to have something to point to at the end of the year to show
| that the money has not been wasted.
|
| In promising work of the highest class, however, results do not
| come in this regular fashion, in fact years may pass without any
| tangible result being obtained, and the position of the paid
| worker would be very embarrassing and he would naturally take to
| work on a lower, or at any rate a different plane where he could
| be sure of getting year by year tangible results which would
| justify his salary.
|
| The position is this: You want one kind of research, but, if you
| pay a man to do it, it will drive him to research of a different
| kind. The only thing to do is to pay him for doing something else
| and give him enough leisure to do research for the love of it._
|
| -- Attributed to J. J. Thompson by Lord Rayleigh, c. 1940
| dqpb wrote:
| I think this roughly boils down to information theory and the
| exploration / exploitation tradeoff. Play is fun because it's
| information-rich. It's personally rewarding because exploration
| opens new doors.
|
| Exploitation is boring because it mostly discovers nothing new.
| It's information-poor, and its reward is mostly fixed, and
| doesn't open any new doors.
| cannabis_sam wrote:
| You get a couple of lines in, and it's painfully familiar, since
| it's sadly so incredibly similar to my waning love of
| programming...
|
| It's wildly destructive for society to have these completely
| devoid of ethics, fascist-style assholes with capital/power, that
| can dictate what what more useful people than can spend their
| time thinking about, yet no-one even thinks it's a problem.
|
| Although to be fair it's just a sub-problem of how humanity has
| forced itself into self-destructive patterns, by ignoring reality
| and following fanatical ideologies about "unrestricted
| capitalism" and "the free market" as if that is some sort of
| divine power...
|
| Imagine spending your short life developing ads for Google or
| Facebook. It would have been objective better for all of humanity
| if all these naive assholes people had become alcoholic bums
| living on the street... that would at least have curbed their
| ability to fuck with the rest of humanity.
| iamgopal wrote:
| So the solution is ... ?
| cannabis_sam wrote:
| Primarily to redistribute capital from clueless geriatrics
| that can't separate Ivanhoe from an iPhone...
|
| The bigger problem is of course how we as a society
| legitimizes destroying young people's future, just to fund
| exorbitant pensions for clueless old people who still think
| 1968 was a "leftist" moment, instead of actually being the
| starting point of the fanatically far-right fantasy world we
| live in today. (The next step is of course to dismantle this
| fantasy world)
|
| (Edit: tldr: let's stop letting pension funds kill children,
| okay..?)
| [deleted]
| kjrose wrote:
| I love reading this when I was in university. I remember thinking
| to myself, may I be burned out enough one day that I can play
| with Mathematics and not have to worry about how to pay rent or
| support my family.
| LordHumungous wrote:
| A while back I realized that I don't care about my career
| anymore: Promotions, politics, etc. I'm just going to work on
| what I enjoy. So far I'm a lot happier this way.
| tryauuum wrote:
| So what do you do for a living nowadays?
| bvsrinivasan wrote:
| The meta-principle is that in complex domains there is no
| straight line, well worn, "plannable" path to greatness.
|
| Kenneth Stanley calls it "The Myth of the objective" and has
| spent the last several years trying to formalize this idea
| (within AI as well) and get it more traction.
|
| Book -- https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25670869-why-
| greatness-c...
|
| Talk -- https://youtu.be/dXQPL9GooyI
| bvsrinivasan wrote:
| In all probability, Youtube's algorithm will already suggest
| this to anyone who watches the talk, but there is a (very)
| long, ML Street Talk interview on this idea here
| https://youtu.be/lhYGXYeMq_E
|
| Stanley addresses some strong and subtle criticisms here but I
| actually preferred the book the most. The book is a bit
| repetitive but has some very good ideas in the appendix.
| humanistbot wrote:
| Reminds me of Suchman's "Plans and Situated Actions" --- an
| anthropological study of plans and planning, which also has a
| lot of implications for AI. Resonances to that famous
| Eisenhower quote "Plans are nothing, planning is everything"
|
| https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/342380.Plans_and_Situate...
| ddoubleU wrote:
| Woah, thanks for sharing this. I can see a connection with the
| way Feyman stopped trying to go for his objective yet he still
| achieved it
| paulz_ wrote:
| Just finished the talk. Plan on reading the book. This is one
| of the most interesting concepts I've come across in recent
| memory. Really appreciate you sharing.
| slx26 wrote:
| Very interesting talk, thanks for sharing, it really adds some
| weight to the intuitive idea showcased in Feynman's note.
| hungryforcodes wrote:
| A couple of comments here focus on the ability to play -- which
| is important -- and on blue sky thinking, etc. All very
| important, true!
|
| But what really strikes me is how this situation Feynman was in
| is a perfect example of Deep Work. He could expore whatever his
| mind needed to explore, and do it for as long and in whatever way
| he needed.
|
| I'm pretty sure this is an often overlooked success factor for
| his Nobel win.
| thisismyswamp wrote:
| Why try to fit this story into some arbitrary modern concept
| that was invented in order to sell books?
| jmfldn wrote:
| Very true. I guess in my original comment I meant to imply this
| in talking about blue sky thinking and following through on it.
| For me this is work which is original, out of leftfield,
| probably intrinsically motivated and which you have the time to
| follow through on deeply for a sustained period of time.
|
| I definitely agree on this being a factor in his, and likely
| several other, Nobel wins
| alskdj21 wrote:
| Intrinsic motivation does lead you to better places. Programming
| was such a breeze before, I enjoyed it. But now, as I start to
| build a portfolio, anxiety creeps up. "Should it be like this or
| this? Man, this doesn't feel right." I admit my way of thinking
| is flawed, which I'm also working on. But it really is different
| when your goal is to enjoy the process than to please prospective
| employers.
| baremetal wrote:
| Just chunk it out. Review and reflect. And then iterate.
| Doesn't have to be perfect the first time.
| mrobot wrote:
| I found an article which points out some negative things
| Feynman's did that i was not aware of. It is an interesting take
| by a woman who was essentially driven away from her natural
| direction in science by bad behavior of men in academia, and i
| sympathize with it. I really liked the original article posted
| here, though, and respect the way Feynman looked at the world.
|
| https://caltechletters.org/viewpoints/feynman-harassment-sci...
| decasteve wrote:
| > And before I knew it (it was a very short time) I was
| ``playing'' - working, really - with the same old problem that I
| loved so much, that I had stopped working on when I went to Los
| Alamos: my thesis-type problems; all those old-fashioned,
| wonderful things.
|
| Given the circumstances of the time, post-war, and his
| circumstances, the loss of his wife and stress of the Manhattan
| project, I might argue a guess that he was grieving.
|
| So it's not just that he found playfulness with physics, it's
| that he was ready to find it.
|
| What I'm trying to say is don't force it if you're grieving or
| suffering from some traumatic event. Feynman could play with
| physics again because he was ready to do so.
| ibic wrote:
| The last sentence "There was no importance to what I was doing,
| but ultimately there was. The diagrams and the whole business
| that I got the Nobel Prize for came from that piddling around
| with the wobbling plate." reminds me of Steve Jobs' speech at
| Stanford - "Of course it was impossible to connect the dots
| looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very
| clear looking backward 10 years later."
| egberts1 wrote:
| Applying a real world observation toward something not related is
| called cross-domain technological transfer.
|
| I did the same with fishing at a lazy brook in 1983.
|
| I observed how the river get all bendy shape of the letter "S",
| how the banks are shallow on inside curves, recalled a geostat
| photos over decades and finally noticed how these increasingly
| curvy S finally touch the other curve to a point of making a new
| waterway path, leaving behind a stagnant bend to dry up.
|
| Network modeling, and the many architectural variants of TCP
| flows came soon afterward, notably delay-tolerant TCP variant
| called Space Communication Protocol Specification (SCPS).
|
| TCP-SACK was instrumental precursor toward its delay-tolerant
| design.
| bserge wrote:
| It's an amazing ability humans (and maybe other animals?) have.
| bradrn wrote:
| > When I was in high school, I'd see water running out of a
| faucet growing narrower, and wonder if I could figure out what
| determines that curve. I found it was rather easy to do.
|
| Out of curiosity, does anyone know the solution to this problem?
| I wouldn't even know how to approach it. (I'm an undergraduate
| physics major; I know nothing about fluid dynamics, but from
| Feynmann's description I suspect that isn't necessary...)
| EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK wrote:
| I think it's a power of -1/4: velocity of a falling object is
| proportional to square root of height, and the stream diameter
| is inverse proportional to square root of velocity.
| [deleted]
| jackdawed wrote:
| I imagined it has to do with how the water coming out of a
| faucet is affected by gravity, and gains velocity. If you
| imagine two cross section slices, one near the faucet, and the
| other near the sink, the bottom slice is going faster than the
| top due to gravity. Another insight is that the amount of water
| (flow rate) passing through these slices remain constant. To
| keep the flow rate the same, it has to be narrower. If you let
| the water fall far enough, it would hit terminal velocity and
| it would not narrower any further. I looked it up and found it
| was called the continuity equation.
| benrbray wrote:
| I like this way of looking at the problem, I wouldn't have
| thought of this! I think this relies implicitly, too, on
| incompressibility of the fluid, no? As well as surface
| tension? Otherwise, we might imagine the fluid having less
| density at the bottom, while occupying a circular cross-
| section of the same area.
| leephillips wrote:
| It does rely on incompressibility, but, to this order, does
| not include surface tension.
|
| The water faucet puzzle that interested me as a student was
| after the water had reached the sink and begun to spread
| out radially from the stream. Have you noticed that there
| is a circular boundary where the layer of water suddenly
| changes depth?
| brilee wrote:
| google "hydraulic jump"
|
| Separately, when you model surface tension, you get an
| equation for when a stream breaks up into droplets - http
| s://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plateau%E2%80%93Rayleigh_insta.
| ..
| Lichtso wrote:
| You mean the hydraulic termination shock?
|
| Something like this: http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-ryzFfMYaEV
| 4/TZist3z0dxI/AAAAAAAAAE...
| leephillips wrote:
| Yup.
|
| It turns out to be more complicated than one (or than I)
| would think at first.
| bradrn wrote:
| > Have you noticed that there is a circular boundary
| where the layer of water suddenly changes depth?
|
| I stumbled upon an explanation for this a while ago:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydraulic_jump
| [deleted]
| marcosdumay wrote:
| > If you let the water fall far enough, it would hit terminal
| velocity
|
| Does it ever hit terminal velocity? There is no air in front
| of it, just more fast falling water.
|
| It's well known that water gains velocity until it vaporizes.
| I assume it vaporizes because some small flow turbulence gets
| strong enough to atomize it once it reaches enough speed.
| mikewarot wrote:
| The water will break apart into raindrops which fall at
| terminal velocity. Depending on relative humidity, they
| evaporate as they go, making them cool and get smaller,
| which lowers the weight/surface area ratio, and they get
| slightly slower.
| robocat wrote:
| Surely it depends on the diameter of the water column.
| For diameters much less than a rain drop, surface tension
| will dominate, and perhaps no column is produced (unless
| initially at high velocity, like water cutting?). For
| larger diameters air pressure will keep the column in
| shape at initiation. For very large diameters I am fairly
| sure the column would very easily exceed the terminal
| velocity of a rain drop. That would be a fun experiment
| to do from the top of a tall building!
|
| Most of our intuition is with columns that have turbulent
| flow and standing waves (e.g. taps), which affect how
| quickly the column disperses.
|
| A non-turbulent column of water acts very differently,
| see https://google.com/search?q=laminar+water+jet
| MaxBarraclough wrote:
| _Bernoulli 's principle_ seems relevant here, I'm surprised no
| one has mentioned it.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernoulli%27s_principle#Incomp...
| Anon84 wrote:
| It's not. It's just conservation of volume. Imagine a thing
| disk of water just as it comes out of the faucet (pi r^2 v*dt)
| as it falls, the speed increases so the same volume of what is
| now thinner and longer (r decreases to account for the increase
| in v).
| fastasucan wrote:
| *volumetric flow
| robochat wrote:
| I think that you mean pi.r*2.v.dt ?
| robochat wrote:
| pi.r2.v.dt
| Anon84 wrote:
| Yes, thank you for noticing it :)
| phonon wrote:
| The water is accelerating downward due to gravity...but the
| amount/s flowing out of the faucet is equal to the amount/s any
| distance below it...so the stream has to get thinner as it gets
| "faster".
| knolan wrote:
| Surface tension plays a role. Water wants to reduce its surface
| area because forces between molecules at the surface pull them
| together. So a droplet of water will want to form a sphere.
|
| A column of water will first form into a cylinder and then
| break up into spherical droplets. It's called the Plateau-
| Rayleigh instability.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plateau-Rayleigh_instability
| eigenket wrote:
| The only role surface tension plays in the Feynman problem is
| to ensure that the cross section of the stream is a circle.
| The rest you can work out based on classical mechanics and
| the fact that the amount of water is conserved.
|
| You actually get exactly the same "thinning" behavior if
| somehow the stream is square shaped or anything else in
| cross-section.
| robocat wrote:
| Air pressure probably dominates over surface tension.
|
| Imagine a water column large enough that surface tension is
| very weak, say a tap with an outlet 1 metre in diameter.
|
| At the exit of the tap the pressure of the water is at air
| pressure ( = 1 bar: any less and the water would be pushed
| back into the tap).
|
| As the column speeds up, the pressure inside the column
| "wants" to decrease, however the air pressure outside
| forces the column to be narrower to maintain 1 bar of
| pressure.
|
| Also the forces within the column depend on the hydrogen
| bonds between the water molecules, which will "pull" the
| column together. Effects at the actual surface will have
| little overall influence (the term surface tension seems
| misleading to me).
|
| Disclaimer: I have only done undergrad physics, and
| although I do try to think things through, I am regularly
| surprised at how wrong I am about basic physics!
| knolan wrote:
| > Also the forces within the column depend on the
| hydrogen bonds between the water molecules, which will
| "pull" the column together. Effects at the actual surface
| will have little overall influence (the term surface
| tension seems misleading to me).
|
| Water is a polar molecule with positive and negative
| charges corresponding to the hydrogen and oxygen atoms.
| This makes it a very 'sticky' molecule and so water
| coalesces into droplets and reaches an equilibrium
| internally. It's the forces between molecules at the
| surface that are not at equilibrium, they experience a
| net attraction which causes the pressure in the droplet
| to increase -- the Laplace pressure. The smaller the
| droplet the higher the Laplace pressure, lots of
| interesting stuff to read about there for you.
|
| Now, consider the water tap, a very small flow rate of
| water will form a droplet which increases in size held in
| place by adhesion to the metal of the tap. Surface
| tension and the wet ability of the metal determines the
| shape of the droplet until it's weight due to gravity
| overcomes the surface tension forces and it falls. The
| ambient pressure has no effect, the pressure of the water
| supply and the air are pretty much balanced, the pressure
| in the droplet is slightly higher due to the surface
| tension.
|
| Increase the flow rate a bit and you will get a thin
| laminar column of water. Here the thinning effect due to
| acceleration is observed. However, the column quickly
| breaks up as per the Plateau-Rayleigh instability; the
| water is pulled into a chain of droplets. The air
| pressure is invariant so you can continue to ignore it.
| You can even work in a vacuum.
|
| Increase the flow rate and the diameter increases due to
| the greater supply pressure needed to drive the flow. The
| supply can have zero velocity but higher pressure. Now
| you get a longer stream of laminar flow before the
| breakup occurs.
|
| Increase the flow rate further and you start to see
| turbulent flow.
| robocat wrote:
| Thanks.
|
| "For the water droplets of 1 micron and 4 mm, the
| capillary pressures are of the order of 10e5 Pa and 102
| Pa, respectively (s=0.072 N/m for water)."[[?]]
|
| Atmospheric pressure is approximately 10e5 Pa at ground
| level. Capillary pressure is another name for Laplace
| pressure from a quick Google.
|
| So as your water column increases diameter, air pressure
| matters more and.
|
| For my example of 1m diameter, I would expect Laplace
| pressure and surface tension to be negligible. And the
| rayleigh instability will still occur at a small column
| diameter, when the fluid is going very fast.
|
| I guess there are two thought experiments:
|
| 1. what happens when you use a liquid with an extremely
| low surface tension in air? (Or maybe even a column of
| heavy gas like uranium hexafluoride thick enough that
| diffusion doesn't dominate?).
|
| 2. How could you model a system to avoid the dynamic
| effects of air circulation (donut flow as occurs with a
| helicopter) and the dynamic effects of having water laden
| air where the column starts to break up. Does a thick
| downwards jet of water at speed (over the terminal
| velocity of rain) still show narrowing? Or do other
| surface interface effects cause problems? What happens to
| a thick downwards jet that is over the speed of sound?
|
| Edit: what I was trying to point out was that "surface
| tension" is misleading, and that air friction and gravity
| are not the only other major forces acting on a stream of
| water from a tap.
|
| [[?]] https://towardsdatascience.com/the-shape-of-a-
| water-droplet-...
| hyperman1 wrote:
| I love HN. Start with feynman fooling around, and end with
| wikipedia explaining how close a man has to stand from a wall
| to minimize splashback while urinating.
|
| (15cm, to spare you the lookup)
| filoeleven wrote:
| Along the same lines, the "chain" shape of a urine stream
| explained: https://youtu.be/eOuai2p3qgw
|
| It's a property of the shape of the orifice and surface
| tension.
| Zelphyr wrote:
| I've been thinking about this a lot since I first heard this
| story about Feynman. I've been in this industry now for 25 years
| and there have been three times when I wanted to quit. During the
| first two, in the back of my mind I still knew I wasn't going to
| and shouldn't. I'm working in an industry doing what I wanted to
| do since I was ten years old.
|
| The third came this time last year. I had lost a parent (not to
| due to COVID), my business had failed (also not due to COVID),
| and then COVID hit so my prospects seemed low for employment. I
| found a contract with someone who turned out to be easily one of
| the most unethical people I had ever worked with.
|
| Little of this had to do with technology but, compounded, I found
| myself in such a deep state of burnout that the thought of
| picking up my computer made me sick. I genuinely didn't want to
| work in technology anymore once that contract had ended. I was
| trying to decide whether I wanted to go back to school for
| something else or try to get on at Costco. The problem with going
| back to school is, I couldn't really pinpoint anything I wanted
| to study so I had all but made my mind up that when things opened
| back up I was going to put my application in at Costco. Hard work
| for lower pay but I have more respect for Costco than I do for a
| lot of companies in my industry. At least Costco solves a real
| problem and is beloved by their customers. They're not pretending
| to be innocent to fomenting sedition while making a buck off of
| abusing peoples privacy.
|
| Fast-forward to around December and I had found employment back
| in tech. This company provides a quality service that directly
| benefits real people. I had quite earnestly tried to avoid it,
| though. It will go down as the oddest interview I've ever had
| because I was basically trying to talk them out of hiring me but
| to their great credit, they did anyway. Due to the nature of the
| job, I have a lot of leeway in deciding how to solve problems
| since I'm responsible for all of the code. I needed a simple log
| server for the various scripts that were running. I looked at all
| the Open Source options and found they offered way more than I
| needed so I decided to write my own. Almost all of the code I
| work with is PHP so I started writing it in that.
|
| One Friday night after work I thought, "Hm, I wonder how hard it
| would be to port this to Clojure?" I had a little experience with
| Clojure from a contract I worked on a year prior while trying to
| bring some much needed cash into my business at the time. I could
| see the power and beauty in it but, still, coming from languages
| that descended from C, the syntax was foreign enough that it was
| tough going at first. I suspect that contract ended because they
| didn't think I was picking it up fast enough for their needs. I
| don't blame them.
|
| Anyway, I found that I had actually picked up enough Clojure
| during that contract that my fingers started flying across the
| keyboard porting my log server. It was... so - much - fun! I was
| playing with programming again! I was exploring and learning and,
| importantly, being productive and solving a real problem.
|
| Now, let's not kid ourselves, this log server isn't some sexy
| blockchain-containerized-whatever. It isn't a product that is
| ever going to be sold for millions of dollars. It isn't going to
| change the world or disrupt any industries. It is very simple and
| pretty much only helps me and one other person at the company.
| You know what? That's really great to me.
|
| I've learned a lot over the years about burnout but they were
| really reinforced in a big way last year. It's important to step
| away from the computer and you need to do so frequently. We get
| weekends and vacations for a reason. Use them! Get outside when
| you can. Get some exercise in whatever ways you enjoy most. Eat
| good, healthy food with people you enjoy being around. (social
| distancing notwithstanding) Have a hobby that is not related to
| your job. I love technology and playing with it can be fun like a
| hobby but the fact is that it's not because my livelihood depends
| on it.
|
| So far, 4-5 months later, that log server written in Clojure is
| still cranking away dutifully. I get a little smile each day when
| I check the latest logs to see if anything needs my attention.
| jll29 wrote:
| Interesting how Feynman can be inspiring people long after his
| death.
|
| He sounds as if he likes to talk about himself rather too much,
| so I wouldn't be surprised if there was a fair amount of
| exaggeration in his prose.
|
| That said, if I made a list of dead people I'd like to spend a
| day with if I could, he'd sure be on it (as an aside, who [else]
| would you add to such a list?).
|
| And he could be serious, too: despite being an outspoken atheist,
| he deeply loved his wife to the extent that he wrote a letter to
| her after she had passed away.
| ibrahimsow1 wrote:
| Viktor E Frankl
| majewsky wrote:
| > despite being an outspoken atheist, he deeply loved his wife
| to the extent that he wrote a letter to her after she had
| passed away.
|
| I honestly don't see how the first part of the sentence factors
| into the second part.
| agumonkey wrote:
| Shannon also had a peculiar way of working, very scattered, I
| think he prioritized bursts of inspiration above everything.
| deepzn wrote:
| one in a quadrillion, but really he's in every one of us. We just
| need to learn to let that inner child come out.
| shoto_io wrote:
| _> Physics disgusts me a little bit now, but I used to enjoy
| doing physics. Why did I enjoy it? I used to play with it._
|
| When I was at uni other grad students often referred to us
| studying physics as "Spielkinder", play children. No one could
| say to what end they really wanted to study physics for. Mostly
| it was just fun understanding how things worked. It was a lot of
| fun.
|
| The downside of this was that when I was finished I really didn't
| know a lot about the real world.
| ArcMex wrote:
| To an extent, this is my attitude towards programming. At the
| very base, my motivation is genuine interest in the project and
| tinkering with it. Even when I build useful apps, straying has
| done more good than harm. By doing this for no reason at than fun
| curiosity, I've broken builds... But more importantly learned how
| to fix and document those scenarios.
| 55555 wrote:
| > I had nothing to do, so I start to figure out the motion of the
| rotating plate. I discover that when the angle is very slight,
| the medallion rotates twice as fast as the wobble rate - two to
| one [Note: Feynman mis-remembers here---the factor of 2 is the
| other way].
|
| To me it's even more inspirational that Feynman misremembered
| basic things about physics he understood better than almost
| anyone. He achieved so much, and yet fundamentally was human and
| imperfect. Any curious smart mind can achieve something great.
| chris_j wrote:
| This is one of my favourite anecdotes from that book. In recent
| decades, we've learned how important intrinsic motivation is, and
| this is a great example of it.
|
| My father was a massive fan of Richard Feynman and also happened
| to be extremely cynical about formal education. He believed that
| if you wanted to learn something, you had to take the initiative
| and learn it for yourself, rather than waiting for the education
| system to suck the enthusiasm for the subject out of you. It was
| only after Dad died that I picked up his copy of Surely You're
| Joking Feynman and learned where he got a lot of his ideas from.
| _ph_ wrote:
| I think you need both. Formal education is great for "basic
| skills". Most people won't invent calculus on their own. Most
| of us learn reading and writing in a formal way. But equally,
| formal education is only half of what is needed to be good in a
| field of work. Then there comes the experimentation, the
| practise. All the knowledge that can't really be taught by a
| book. Sometimes a good teacher or mentor can help on that side,
| but real excellence comes through your own tinkering.
|
| The anecdote of Feynman shows this actually well. He gained a
| lot of knowledge and inspiration for other problems solutions
| by working out the motion of the plate. But he did so by using
| the calculus and tools of theoretical mechanics. Those were
| what enabled him to do the theoretical description which then
| yielded the insights.
| ip26 wrote:
| In different terms, we've all heard _If I have seen far, it
| is only because I stood on the shoulders of giants_.
|
| Those who came before give you a leg up so you can work on
| the next problem. There aren't enough years in a life to
| develop particle physics by yourself, completely from
| scratch.
| Trex_Egg wrote:
| Wise as Wisdom
| chris_j wrote:
| Wise words. I'm sure most of us would never have learned all
| the of the basics of mathematics on our own. Though I do
| remember Feynman claiming in the book that he'd come up with
| certain trigonometric concepts on his own and then had to un-
| learn the names that he'd created for them and learn to call
| them sin, cos etc. That was pretty mind-blowing.
|
| I suppose the question for me is: how do you find the right
| balance between formal learning and the self-directed
| learning, experimentation and practice?
| Tyr42 wrote:
| I think he was fed up with the notations, and made his own,
| rather than coming up with trig from scratch.
| zackbloom wrote:
| I wish that in each generation we got to choose 100 people to
| keep alive just a bit longer. Feynman would be on my list.
| oceliker wrote:
| This is very nice, but I'm more curious about why there is a
| "repostindays=413" parameter in the URL :)
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