[HN Gopher] Hacker Laws
___________________________________________________________________
Hacker Laws
Author : maltalex
Score : 135 points
Date : 2022-01-01 17:26 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| vikingcaffiene wrote:
| These types of lists are nice and I appreciate the time and
| effort put into making them. I do wonder how much utility they
| provide though? I personally find it a bit overwhelming. Like is
| idea that I sit down and memorize all this stuff?
|
| In the past when lists like this come up I read a bit, then
| bookmark for later. Later never comes and now I just have this
| bookmark lying around amongst the thousands of others I have made
| over the years.
|
| Maybe a more useful way to present this stuff is figure out a
| better way to give you the law relevant to the context in which
| you are in? For the sake of argument I could see something like
| this being useful:
|
| INPUT
|
| I am a `_developer_` working at a `_start up_` who `_needs to
| give_` `_an estimate_`
|
| OUTPUT
|
| - see Hofstadter's Law
|
| Probably a non trivial task and I'm sure there's a law in that
| list that describes this phenomenon!
| jmchuster wrote:
| I think it might be more useful to think of this as a list that
| could help you expose "unknown unknowns". These aren't ironclad
| rules, but they are each a piece of gathered advice that hold
| some truth in some context. So if you encounter one that makes
| no sense, then great, that's a potential blind spot that you've
| transformed from an "unknown unknown" to a "known unknown".
|
| So let's take your example of Hofstadter's Law
|
| > It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take
| into account Hofstadter's Law.
|
| So your reaction to this might be one of:
|
| - Yes, that's a funny way to put it. I've spent many years
| estimating projects and matching up the final time taken, and
| even though i've gotten better at it, i still underestimate a
| little on each project. Here are different patterns i've seen
| for how my estimates end up going wrong. Here are different
| approaches i use now to try to mitigate how wrong my estimates
| end up being.
|
| - Huh, that's interesting. I've just started being a manager,
| and i've been wondering why everything seems to take longer
| than i expect. Am i just the only one who is bad at estimating?
| Or is this some kind of problem that everyone encounters. Maybe
| i should look up techniques or ask advice on this subject.
|
| - I don't know what this means. Why would anyone's estimates be
| wrong? Writing a website is like making a ham sandwich right?
| Once you do it once or twice, you must be able to estimate it
| perfectly every time.
| GuestHNUser wrote:
| >These aren't ironclad rules, but they are each a piece of
| gathered advice that hold some truth in some context.
|
| This is spot on. There is a time and a place for these "laws"
| which is sometimes forgotten. Don't be dogmatic about
| following them. They will be detrimental to a team following
| them blindly.
| akkartik wrote:
| I tend to agree with you about generic awesome lists, but this
| one seems useful as a reference. Bookmarking for the next time
| I can't remember what the Lindy Effect is called.
|
| ..wait, it doesn't include the Lindy Effect :D
| robbedpeter wrote:
| It's good to give it a read so you're familiar with the
| concepts, but then remember where the list is, or archive it so
| you can return to it.
|
| Later down the line, you're going to encounter a problem and
| one of the ideas in the list will be helpful in framing the
| context of your problem. It may or may not help in finding a
| solution, but it can help articulate the problem to other
| people.
| amelius wrote:
| Amelius' law: Management will always refer to Hofstadter's law
| as a myth or an excuse.
| vikingcaffiene wrote:
| Heh. I have been at the butt end of that one a few times.
| Another favorite of mine is when they push back with
| Parkinson's law: work expands to meet time available for its
| completion.
| KarlKemp wrote:
| Some of these are actual science, such as Fitt's law. Some are
| humorous simplifications that point to observed phenomena that
| are good to know. And then there's bullshit like "Dilbert's law":
| information-free inside jokes technical people come up with to
| disparage other disciplines.
| krapp wrote:
| I'm surprised the Gervais principle[0] isn't there, as it
| supercedes the Peter Principle and Dilbert's law as far as I'm
| concerned:
|
| All organizations are perfectly pathological, their hierarchy
| being divided up between sociopaths (management), clueless
| (middle-management) and losers (everyone else). Sociopaths, in
| their own best interests, knowingly promote over-performing
| losers into middle-management, groom under-performing losers
| into sociopaths, and leave the average bare-minimum-effort
| losers to fend for themselves.
|
| [0]https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-
| principle-...
| behnamoh wrote:
| Other laws that I liked:
|
| "If you're not 5 minutes early, you're 10 minutes late."
|
| "The expectation that more programmers on the team leads to
| faster shipment times is like expecting two women to give life to
| a baby in 4.5 months."
|
| "Only 50% of programming is writing code. The other 90% is
| debugging."
|
| Hofstadter's law: "It always takes longer than you expect, even
| when you take into account Hofstadter's Law."
| motohagiography wrote:
| Feels like I learned most of these from the fortune line in my
| .login file in the 90s, and now they form the landmarks of how I
| reason about problems. As a teenager, these quips were profound
| wisdom, and in fact some of them were.
|
| Simple mental reference tools like the six reliability curves and
| mean time between failure, pareto distribution, network and
| cascading effects, shortest paths and solvability, recursion,
| mutability locking and versioning, complexity classes, logical
| contrapositives, dependent and independent probability, are all
| things the fortune file seemed to have quips about and if you had
| a sense of humor, you could map them to everyday situations.
| Hackers are an old trope now, but when you read these together
| again, it was a very rich and distinct culture and way of
| thinking. I appreciate seeing these put together.
| buwka wrote:
| I've always found the 90-9-1 rule fascinating. Especially when
| considering anonymous or semi-anonymous forums such as Hacker
| News or Reddit. These sites have large audiences and don't
| require users to log in. Therefore, they have an incredible
| amount of "lurkers" who do not comment, post, or vote. I think
| voting is an important aspect of content curation. So if a type
| of individual is more likely to vote, then that type of content
| will be more prevalent even if it is not necessarily the content
| the 90% want to see. But they're not voting so they're
| irrelevant.
|
| In turn, the users who do actively post and comment have an
| amplified affect on what the 90% actually see. I find this to be
| particularly interesting when the culture of a userbase changes.
| I've been a long time user of Reddit, however rarely am I ever
| logged in. Overtime, I've felt that the culture of Reddit has
| changed to be much more liberal with posting low-effort comments.
| Many new users post on every post they see, while a previous
| generation of users may have dismissed that kind of behavior as
| being "Facebook-like" behavior. I think it may be another factor
| in the age old rule that the larger a site grows, the more the
| quality of discussion drops.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2022-01-01 23:00 UTC)