5 ms·

Ask HN: What's the best advice you ignored and later wished you hadn't?

13 points by sylm 1y ago

sleepyguy 1y ago
Drip into an SP 500 index fund. I still did all right, but it took a lot more work and many mistakes to achieve the same results after 30+ years. To my credit, I still picked some amazing stocks, but I had weak hands and would have done much better if I had just forgotten about them.
JohnFen 1y ago
"Pay yourself first" Take 10% of any money that you receive and put it somewhere safe and where it takes real effort to get it back out. Then don't touch it unless your need is truly dire. The idea is that regardless of your income level, you can almost certainly live on 10% less without a substantial hit to your standard of living, so pay it to Future You. The earlier in life you start, the better.
- marssaxman 1y ago
  > regardless of your income level, you can almost certainly live on 10% less This did not become true for me until my very late 20s, and by that point I was so well adapted to living on the edge, in a world which offered no end of surprising new ways to knock my financial situation out from under me, that it took years more before I started to see any value in planning for anything more than a couple months away.
- InfiniteLoup 1y ago
  >put it somewhere safe What is even "safe" these days? ETFs? Treasury bonds?
  - JohnFen 1y ago
    "Safe" is a relative term, yes. Right now, there is no actual "safe" place, but there are some places that are less risky than others.
ThrowawayR2 1y ago
Being competent at coding is mere table stakes for being a software engineer. Success at being a software engineer is mostly about combining that coding skills with people skills: coordinating with people, negotiating with people, communicating effectively with people, working with people who are difficult, etc. I would have been far more successful if I'd improved my people skills early in my career alongside improving my coding skills.
- OnionBlender 1y ago
  How do you improve your people skills? I mean besides just experience.
  - ThrowawayR2 1y ago
    You can accelerate the benefit of experience by paying closer attention to what your co-workers and immediate managers do when there's a crisis, disagreement, etc. Try to figure out what tactics they're using and think about how well or badly what they did worked. Also think what you would have done in their shoes and try to game out how others might have responded to that. There's also plenty of books out there on people skills. 99% of them are rubbish but a few have stood the test of time, e.g. the Dale Carnegie books.
    - sylm 1y ago
      Thank you very much for your suggestion. It's very useful to me.
taurath 1y ago
Don’t drop out of college to work, even if you have to go into debt. People value the social signal more than you think. If you’re ever up against someone with a degree, even if you’re amazing, they’ll choose the degree 9 times out of 10. It’s not meritocratic, it’s CYA.
- mcsniff 1y ago
  It is a great social signal -- excellent way to weed out people or orgs I dont need to waste time with. Value real life world experience less than college? Not compatible, move on.
  - taurath 1y ago
    This worked well for me, until I couldn't work for 3 years. Then, it was an automatic rejection even for companies I got refered to. Go without paper at your own peril.
giantg2 1y ago
"Don't get married"
9o1d 1y ago
Tip: Use Python Twenty years ago I tried to start using Python. I tried to make a sniffer in Python - a program for logging data on the network. But this program returned an error. I started to figure it out, I found that the error was in the Python implementation. I then rewrote this program in C - it worked very reliably. Since then I have avoided using Python. For the last five years I have been doing research on writing effective programs. I have used C and even made a framework for it, but programming remains difficult under time constraints. Then I tried to make a prototype in Python. In one day I tested several ideas. I can say that I like writing in Python. I plan to make a translator for automatically rewriting programs from Python to C. I plan to test ideas in Python and then rewrite them in C.
9o1d 1y ago
Advice: Buy Bitcoin Fifteen years ago, I made my own website and came up with a digital currency for it. These were PNG files with watermarks, with my money drawn on them. They were similar to the ones I printed at school with my friends. They were called "CHATL". At school, I didn't know how to give my money value, it turns out it had to be lent. Returning to PNG files, they could be viewed on a computer screen, printed and uploaded to a website to put into an account. But I couldn't solve the problem of simultaneous ownership. Such money turned out to be disposable. At that time, I had heard about Bitcoin, knew that it was worth about a dollar, but I didn't attach much importance to it. Besides, in Russia, I didn't have a dollar bank card to pay abroad. It's funny that the same thing is happening now, we have blocked international bank cards and I use Bitcoin.

13 points by sylm 1y ago

Drip into an SP 500 index fund. I still did all right, but it took a lot more work and many mistakes to achieve the same results after 30+ years. To my credit, I still picked some amazing stocks, but I had weak hands and would have done much better if I had just forgotten about them.

JohnFen 1y ago

"Pay yourself first" Take 10% of any money that you receive and put it somewhere safe and where it takes real effort to get it back out. Then don't touch it unless your need is truly dire. The idea is that regardless of your income level, you can almost certainly live on 10% less without a substantial hit to your standard of living, so pay it to Future You. The earlier in life you start, the better.

marssaxman 1y ago
> regardless of your income level, you can almost certainly live on 10% less This did not become true for me until my very late 20s, and by that point I was so well adapted to living on the edge, in a world which offered no end of surprising new ways to knock my financial situation out from under me, that it took years more before I started to see any value in planning for anything more than a couple months away.
InfiniteLoup 1y ago
>put it somewhere safe What is even "safe" these days? ETFs? Treasury bonds?
- JohnFen 1y ago
  "Safe" is a relative term, yes. Right now, there is no actual "safe" place, but there are some places that are less risky than others.

ThrowawayR2 1y ago

Being competent at coding is mere table stakes for being a software engineer. Success at being a software engineer is mostly about combining that coding skills with people skills: coordinating with people, negotiating with people, communicating effectively with people, working with people who are difficult, etc. I would have been far more successful if I'd improved my people skills early in my career alongside improving my coding skills.

OnionBlender 1y ago
How do you improve your people skills? I mean besides just experience.
- ThrowawayR2 1y ago
  You can accelerate the benefit of experience by paying closer attention to what your co-workers and immediate managers do when there's a crisis, disagreement, etc. Try to figure out what tactics they're using and think about how well or badly what they did worked. Also think what you would have done in their shoes and try to game out how others might have responded to that. There's also plenty of books out there on people skills. 99% of them are rubbish but a few have stood the test of time, e.g. the Dale Carnegie books.
  - sylm 1y ago
    Thank you very much for your suggestion. It's very useful to me.

taurath 1y ago

Don’t drop out of college to work, even if you have to go into debt. People value the social signal more than you think. If you’re ever up against someone with a degree, even if you’re amazing, they’ll choose the degree 9 times out of 10. It’s not meritocratic, it’s CYA.

mcsniff 1y ago
It is a great social signal -- excellent way to weed out people or orgs I dont need to waste time with. Value real life world experience less than college? Not compatible, move on.
- taurath 1y ago
  This worked well for me, until I couldn't work for 3 years. Then, it was an automatic rejection even for companies I got refered to. Go without paper at your own peril.

giantg2 1y ago

"Don't get married"

9o1d 1y ago

Tip: Use Python Twenty years ago I tried to start using Python. I tried to make a sniffer in Python - a program for logging data on the network. But this program returned an error. I started to figure it out, I found that the error was in the Python implementation. I then rewrote this program in C - it worked very reliably. Since then I have avoided using Python. For the last five years I have been doing research on writing effective programs. I have used C and even made a framework for it, but programming remains difficult under time constraints. Then I tried to make a prototype in Python. In one day I tested several ideas. I can say that I like writing in Python. I plan to make a translator for automatically rewriting programs from Python to C. I plan to test ideas in Python and then rewrite them in C.

9o1d 1y ago

Advice: Buy Bitcoin Fifteen years ago, I made my own website and came up with a digital currency for it. These were PNG files with watermarks, with my money drawn on them. They were similar to the ones I printed at school with my friends. They were called "CHATL". At school, I didn't know how to give my money value, it turns out it had to be lent. Returning to PNG files, they could be viewed on a computer screen, printed and uploaded to a website to put into an account. But I couldn't solve the problem of simultaneous ownership. Such money turned out to be disposable. At that time, I had heard about Bitcoin, knew that it was worth about a dollar, but I didn't attach much importance to it. Besides, in Russia, I didn't have a dollar bank card to pay abroad. It's funny that the same thing is happening now, we have blocked international bank cards and I use Bitcoin.