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"But then I decided to just fix it for him by doing some surgery in the repl." I've always found it's a good idea to not deviate. Whether it be running, parkin

by larrys 14y ago

"But then I decided to just fix it for him by doing some surgery in the repl." I've always found it's a good idea to not deviate. Whether it be running, parking or anything else once you deviate from some regular behavior you run into potential problems that you hadn't anticipated. "For some reason I didn't check the comments after the surgery to see if they were in the right place. " More or less my point. If this wasn't a deviation from normal behavior you would have "checked the comments after the surgery" because it would have either become habit or the shear number of times you tried a fix resulting in an error would have made that more likely to occur.

irahul 14y ago
> I've always found it's a good idea to not deviate. Aren't you assuming "surgery in repl" is a deviation? What if it's normal course of action for him? > More or less my point. If this wasn't a deviation from normal behavior you would have "checked the comments after the surgery" because it would have either become habit or the shear number of times you tried a fix resulting in an error would have made that more likely to occur. How about the opposite scenario? He has done it so many times with desired results, that he didn't bother checking?
- badgar 14y ago
  > Aren't you assuming "surgery in repl" is a deviation? What if it's normal course of action for him? This is a big difference between engineering and hacking. An engineer would never regularly do something so dangerous. But I suspect pg isn't an engineer when he works on HN, I suspect he is a hacker, and just does whatever he wants to, whenever he wants. Which is his prerogative.
prawks 14y ago
> I've always found it's a good idea to not deviate. > you run into potential problems that you hadn't anticipated. The second statement is no reason to live by the first. In fact, I think you'd be doing yourself a disservice by staying so comfortable. Being comfortable with the unanticipated, however, is a powerful quality to have.
- rwallace 14y ago
  That's fine, but try to become comfortable with the unanticipated on a test server, not the production server.
scotty79 14y ago
If you don't deviate from what you usually do you don't learn. Obviously don't deviate from routine (or rather prescribed procedure) when you are running nuclear power plant or airplane maintenance. But when tinkering with the site that gives you no money and won't cost any lives you can loosen up a bit.

by larrys 14y ago

irahul 14y ago

> I've always found it's a good idea to not deviate. Aren't you assuming "surgery in repl" is a deviation? What if it's normal course of action for him? > More or less my point. If this wasn't a deviation from normal behavior you would have "checked the comments after the surgery" because it would have either become habit or the shear number of times you tried a fix resulting in an error would have made that more likely to occur. How about the opposite scenario? He has done it so many times with desired results, that he didn't bother checking?

badgar 14y ago
> Aren't you assuming "surgery in repl" is a deviation? What if it's normal course of action for him? This is a big difference between engineering and hacking. An engineer would never regularly do something so dangerous. But I suspect pg isn't an engineer when he works on HN, I suspect he is a hacker, and just does whatever he wants to, whenever he wants. Which is his prerogative.

prawks 14y ago

> I've always found it's a good idea to not deviate. > you run into potential problems that you hadn't anticipated. The second statement is no reason to live by the first. In fact, I think you'd be doing yourself a disservice by staying so comfortable. Being comfortable with the unanticipated, however, is a powerful quality to have.

rwallace 14y ago
That's fine, but try to become comfortable with the unanticipated on a test server, not the production server.

scotty79 14y ago

If you don't deviate from what you usually do you don't learn. Obviously don't deviate from routine (or rather prescribed procedure) when you are running nuclear power plant or airplane maintenance. But when tinkering with the site that gives you no money and won't cost any lives you can loosen up a bit.