Ask HN: What have you recently learned about yourself? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What have you recently learned about yourself?

I am capable of domestic violence, despite a lot of evidence in my life that suggested I would never do such a thing or even need to worry about that side of myself.

Similar. In my case not violence and not necessarily targeted at other people, but I surprised myself how twisted my morals can get.

I even contemplated suicide about it. Of course people come rushing and tell you that you have a mental illness because no one in his right mind would think of killing himself for something that might as well not happened as no one took notice of it. But it is in my mind and I have to life with my mind.

Then again, centuries ago people raped and murdered and yet aspired to become great people. And some did. Certainly they never thought about ending their lifes merely because a million other people hoped they would die in a ditch.

Whatever it is you've done, or thought about, you should remember you always have choices, and one of the points that's crucial to making the best choices is... your past does not have to determine your future. Regardless of our past, we can change our future. Our ability to do so is governed by how intrinsic our past has become in shaping our current identity, how much we need to hold onto that past to feel like we know ourselves. Ask yourself this, if you could start life afresh, what would you want to do with it that you're not doing now?

An often repeated thought. Yet at some point (usually when children or rape is involved) people tend to suddenly forget about tolerance or sympathy and throw around death sentences, castration or torture. There are certain mistakes one can not do even once in most societies. And in some cases, or rather in some countries you won't have a life to return to (or you're dead in the first place).

Yes, there is a point at which tolerance becomes harder to find, such as when children or rape is involved. However, to me, a wasted life is a waste. Imagine an individual serving a life sentence for a horrible crime that they were definitely guilty of. They may never get out of prison, fine, but putting aside their predicament, why wouldn't you hope for them to make the best of what life they have? There is no benefit or pleasure in holding grudges, there is plenty of benefit in helping others find a more fulfilling life. Some people like to demonise others in order to separate themselves from 'evil' people, but the truth is everyone of us is capable of 'good' and 'evil', all capable of making a positive or negative impact on the world around them, and I refuse to see someone as sub-human just because they've made some really poor choices up until now.

I think, one should carefully choose the thoughts to derive one’s actual moral standards from. We have constant access to all kinds of information with vastly varying moral standards and that certainly lowers the inhibition threshold quite a bit. In a traditional social setting it’s much more difficult to think about anything you want, because there are fewer stimulating responses.

I'm not sure I understand what you're trying to say. Do you mean that it's easier to do something bad because we are surrounded by bad things happening? Or that it's easier to get rotten thoughts because we know so much about things that happened, are happening, or that were justified in ancient times?

I think what 3rd3 was saying is that we can choose the morals we live by, but without being limited by societal norms the range of choice we have for defining our morals is too broad.

I'm not sure which of your comments that 3rd3 was picking up on, but that's what 3rd3's comment seemed to say.

That captures exactly what I was trying to describe.

Whilst I do not condone domestic violence, I accept we are all capable of acting on thoughts that feel beyond our control. What do you think brought it out of you?

I'm very sorry to hear that, thank you for making an anonymous account to open up about it. I hope you are or will be able to deal with it well.

That I should actually give myself some credit and that I'm not that bad. I gave a talk on Javascript[0] recently when I went to Malaysia. I thought I did an extremely terrible hatchet job. The audience thought otherwise, and I took quite a long time (like a few days) to adjust to the fact that I did okay.

edit:

[0] slides if you're interested: https://speakerdeck.com/chewxy/underhanded-javascript-how-to...

I turn into a bumbling idiot when asked to code in front of anyone. Since I'm out of work, this is a bit of a problem. :P

I've not been valuing myself. Being good with people and social situations as well as engineering and problem solving is valuable. At least that's what I'm having to remind myself. And I'm starting to believe it!

The only real problem is when I'm programming or furthering my tech skills I feel like I'm short changing the social side. Same thing going the other direction. As I'm getting more comfortable with the tension between the two modes I'm feeling good about my potential as a consultant.

That I spend an unhealthy amount of time on HN. In my defense, my day job is as dead end as it gets.

That I thrive in relatively structured work environments (as frustrating as they can be), but fall into apathy and depression in more horizontal/adhoc/Valve style places. This doesn't bode well for my potential move to SF/SV...

- I find it very hard to relax over the weekend. But when I manage to do so, it helps my productivity for the week a lot.

- I can't stop something I don't like about myself merely by being aware of it.

That, every year, I'm becoming more and more cynical.

I worry a lot about others thinking I'm a retard.

I have practically no chance of getting a job in software development or something similar.

I'm prone to being misquoted, which is probably worse than being misunderstood (I learnt I was prone to being misunderstood when I was about six).

I really enjoy hideous data structures.

Unless you are very bad developer, like those that don't pass the fizzbuzz test, i don't see why somebody would not have chance to get a job in software development.

I was recently told by someone who works for an IT recruitment agency that I would find it very hard to get a job unless I already worked in software development. Employers want people with experience.

I think Jeff Atwood has written about prospective employees not passing fizzbuzz. He also mentioned people who claimed to have 15 years experience in software development taking 15 minutes to make a solution.

  #!/usr/bin/perl
  #1390894695.273252
  #07:38:15 28/01/2014
  #fizzbuzz.pl
  use warnings;
  use strict;
  my $i=1;
  for( ; $i<=100; ++$i) {
    if(!($i%3)) {
      print "fizz";
    }
    if(!($i%5)) {
      print "buzz";
    }
    if($i%3 and $i%5) {
      print "$i";
    }
    print "\n";
  }

I started learning perl a couple of days ago.

Why would you think people would view you as a retard? From your example below, you can do FizzBuzz, and I am sure at least writing some basic program.

There, if you have difficulties to express yourself, it's just a matter of interview training. I am sure you will do well.

> Why would you think people would view you as a retard?

In the past, I have been classed as dumb by many different people. The term "intelligence" is hard to define, especially these days with lumps of silicon and metal being used to predict the weather up to five days in advance and simulating nuclear detonations. Because of this it is very open to interpretation. The closest I've got to a reasonable definition is nicked off Greg Chaitin, a researcher in information theory:

  Furnish an intelligence with a block of data, if the intelligence can compress the data, it has achieved some understanding of it.

When it comes to writing basic programs, I'm most experienced in C. Something simple can easily turn into 600 lines of drunk double dutch.

> There, if you have difficulties to express yourself, it's just a matter of interview training. I am sure you will do well.

Unfortunately, I hardly ever get interviews. I have trouble getting a minimum wage job. The last interview I attended I mentioned writing a C program to determine the positive square root of two to fifteen decimal places without resorting to the standard library. As soon as I started trying to explain how it worked (just successive approximations then squaring the answer to check it), I think I blew their fuses.

That sounds very odd to me, because you write proper sentences and express yourself very clearly by writing. If that can help you, I can arrange with you a mock interview on skype and tell you if I think there is something wrong with the way you speak (please note that I am not a native English speaker and have a strong French accent). Feel free to contact me on my email on my profile.

It's not a recent thing, but it gets clearer and clearer to me that I am far less in control of myself than I like to think. I mean this in the "Power Of Habit" sense- I run far more by routine than I'd like to think, and this leads to some suboptimal outcomes across all spheres.

Plenty, but picking one lesson... aside from death, guilt is the biggest block to building positive momentum.

Another lesson is that I seem to have picked up at least some narcissistic tendencies.

That I am not aware of some expectations I have of others until after they have been broken.

It all goes back to childhood.

That while I can really easily and quickly get myself engaged with an idea I come up with, I can't come up with an idea that doesn't suck...yet

> ... I can't come up with an idea that doesn't suck...yet

Don't be hard on yourself, Sir James Dyson's invention of the bagless vacuum cleaner sucked loads, yet he's made millions.

Ha :) I guess it beats spending ages on something that sucks

I am not very good at badminton.

That I have to absolutely get out of IT, because it has become a soulless, mind-breaking, and exhaustive way to be exploited by idiots. I suppose any job is like that, given how Western society is organized these days. But I have no other useful skills and though I have a work ethic, my CV is such that if I even applying for a bar job, or busing tables, ... "why the hell are you applying for this job?" I'm stuck and can't get over this reluctance to burn all my savings trying to change my direction in life.

Apply for a part time/evening job doing something like bar work, when they ask you why you're applying say you need the extra money from a second job. Once you're settled, quit your job in IT and look for more shifts at your newer job.

Do you have to get out of IT entirely? I thought IT is a big enough field that no matter what kind of job you have, you're able to find something almost opposite of it. I'm sorry to see that I'm wrong. What is it that you need that you can't find within the IT field?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com