Comment by digging | Hacker News Reader

Comment by digging | Hacker News Reader

I don't completely agree with the article... For example:

> Things go faster. Like in the example of the ATM you won’t lose time learning things you don’t want to learn. You can use the knowledge of an expert on the topic to accelerate the process.

This is actually an example of the opposite. How much time does she spend going inside the bank, waiting in line, and asking a person for help over the course of her life? Is it really less than the amount of time it takes to learn to use an ATM?

That is, say tP = (time it takes to get personal help), tA = (time it takes to use an ATM), tL = (time it takes to learn), and N = (number of times she'll withdraw/deposit over her life, after making this decision).

Is it true that (tP x N) < (tA x N) + tL ?

tA is definitely smaller than tP. And I don't think tL is a colossal number, so I think it probably isn't true.

Second,

> It’s extremely easy to do.

I don' think that's always true, either. It can actually be much more difficult at times. Not everyone wants to help, not everyone is good at helping, not everyone can help. It gets easier the more you practice/learn the skill of asking for help, though.

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sidenote: The article could use a bit of proofreading; I noticed several grammatical mistakes

> The article could use a bit of proofreading; I noticed several grammatical mistakes

I'm not sure how to do that, could you show me how that works? I'm just an old grandmother, you see, I've never used a spellchecker...

Hard counter: "No"

> sidenote: The article could use a bit of proofreading; I noticed several grammatical mistakes

Well it appears the author is likely from Spain. So probably English is not their native language.

haha you got me, I'm from Spain. I tried to fix all the grammatical errors with Grammarly, but apparently it wasn't enough. If you can share which grammar errors are there I would be more than happy to fix them :)

Apologies, it's quite good overall. I'm just nitpicking. Here's what I noticed:

- "...and how [it] isn’t trivial for people.."

- "...argue that you don’t have to worry about looking dumb and [to/should] ask questions..."

- "If you don’t want to do something[,] make another person do it for you, and playing like you’re dumb [is] a great way of doing so."

- "...maintain focus on one thing at a time, [so/and] removing tasks that distract you..."

> This is actually an example of the opposite. How much time does she spend going inside the bank, waiting in line, and asking a person for help over the course of her life? Is it really less than the amount of time it takes to learn to use an ATM?

One issue with these technologies is, they are not 100% reliable and there's a non-zero chance that you would need to fallback to a human in uncovered edge cases. Speaking of ATM, I personally experienced 20% or higher failure rate when depositing cash via ATMs. Sometimes a retry would work, sometimes not.

Same problem with self checkout in grocery stores, airport self check-in kiosk, courier dropboxes prepaid self-printed shipping label...etc.

Interesting. I have a 0% failure rate with all those machines except grocery self-check; I'd say those have around a 1% failure rate for me.

> This is actually an example of the opposite. How much time does she spend going inside the bank, waiting in line, and asking a person for help over the course of her life?

Yes, you're right that for the common people, it would be faster just to learn how to do it and get the money yourself. Maybe this wasn't the best example. The idea I wanted to transmit is that sometimes the process you need to learn is too complex, so tL >> N x tA, either because tL is big or because N is low. Maybe a better example is to fix a broken car engine.

That's certainly a good point. I once picked up a manual on my car so that I could fix small things myself and wouldn't be helpless, but I defer to professionals for complex problems because it's not worth my time to learn how to do it myself if I'll only do it once or twice in a lifetime, and if the time it takes to do it is nearly as much as the time it takes to have someone else do it.

I guess the ATM example caught me because I feel ATMs are such a big time-saver!

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