This has always been the fun part of programming to me. I know most people hate it, but I really don’t mind being on-call (ok I hate being woken up) and fixing weird bugs that users run into. All these small edge cases that people run into because reality is odd. Of course I’m in scientific programming so that probably colors my view.
It’s always a little disappointing to me when I think I’ve run into something unique but it ends up being user error or something.
The first time I built a freestanding bookshelf, I put a lot of effort into making the feet level and the back straight and at a right angle to the feet. Once I put it up against the wall I'd built it for, I realized I'd solved completely different problem than the problem I really had. I needed crooked bookshelf, since the wall was totally tilted.
In the end I screwed some wall shelves in and called it good enough.
Hah, yeah same. I grew up in a house built with hand tools sometime around 1910 (family bought it from an old lady whose father built it), not a single corner was square (though things were generally good vertically by some miracle), but it wasn’t noticeable until whenever were doing major work.
Also learned that lath and plaster needs some special consideration when screwing/nailing things for securement, as the lath (wood strips) could split, causing a subsequent crack in the plaster. Basically for screws or bigger nails, it’s a good idea to drill a small hole first to lessen the pressure, or do a bigger hole and use a spring bolt anchor.
Sounds about right. I approached this in a different way in my office.
The walls aren't straight, either vertically or horizontally, and they're not even consistently wonky along any given axis.
So I installed uprights vertically, using transparent polycarbonate spacers of different depths at the attachment points[0]. I then installed shelves on the uprights and aligned them horizontally.
The variation is only +/- 6mm or so (for around 12mm variation across the 2.5m x 2.44m wall) but, if I hadn't done this, my shelves wouldn't be level, and wouldn't even be consistently non-level, so would have been awkward to install along the full length of the wall, would all be misaligned with eachother, and would have looked incredibly janky.
[0] In hindsight I wish I'd gone for these in different colours rather than just plain transparent, to make more of a feature of them. The walls are white so I think orange, blue, red, and yellow would have worked well.
I have been getting a lot more into DIY and that's my experience myself. I keep running back to the store because there is some detail I haven't considered. Iteration time is so much slower than software... kinda bugs me how much you have to plan upfront and think through instead of just YAGNI and agile-ing your way through it.
I put up a notice board in my kitchen when I moved into a new place, and it looked squint even though my level said it was straight. I flipped the spirit level end-for-end, still straight - if the level was off and the workpiece was straight, then flipping it would make it read wrong.
Nope. Level was okay. Checked the wall, wall is plumb. Wait a sec - the wallpaper is not straight.
So the notice board went on lined up with the wallpaper, not reality.
The other one was fitting a six metre aluminium pole with a two metre aerial on top to a brand new multi-million pound building. The brackets and pole were absolutely straight and plumb. Got back down off the cherry picker, walked back across the yard to the van, pole looks really squint.
After much upping and downing and to-ing and fro-ing, it became clear that I needed to pack the aerial pole mounting to lean it over by a couple of degrees so it didn't look wrong!
The pole was straight, the multi-million pound brand new high end amazing building was distinctly on the piss with not one truly plumb vertical component anywhere.
My father, (who by profession was a CA with MBA, but is exceptionally handy) has regularly reminded me that walls/floors and ceilings are pretty much never straight and level, and over here they're brick and mortar, not wood.
This must be a well-known fact to all trades people who work on cupboards, tiling, door mounting, etc. But when you understand this, then you realize that everything is built to be forgiving of this reality.
E.g. prefabricated bedroom cupboards will always be fitted with fillers on each side and a kickboard for the bottom. This allows you to use feet/wedges underneath the cupboard to make it stand-up perfectly straight (which is not necessarily parallel with the floor and/or walls), but because of the fillers/kickboard being wide/tall enough and cut to fit the irregular/skew shape, you don't tend to notice.
Beading around wooden door frames is for the same reason, it hides the little gap that is invariably at points around it, either due to the hole in the wall being skew and/or slightly arched.
Based on what is the level of detail to reality suprising? To me suprising means mysteriously or improbably unexpected. Why should we expect reality to be simple. Note complex and simple are somewhat subjective. The human brain evolved to just sufficient baseline level be able to handle the level of complexity of reality. So why would it be unexpected that humans find realty complex when our brains are calibrated just enough to handle it.
Reality does not have amount of details, it is infinite in all directions. Its only that we perceived certain amount of details, some more some less. One can spend their whole life mastering a single aspect and there always will be room to improve.
Even human perception is able to peek into the infinite nature of things, not the intellect though, the intellect can only work with limited and defined "things".
It's unknowable through current means of science. There are ways to experience that, I did some of them so I'm talking from my experience. And no, I can not prove it, if it was provable like that it would be already done.
> If you’re a programmer, you might think that the fiddliness of programming is a special feature of programming, but really it’s that everything is fiddly, but you only notice the fiddliness when you’re new, and in programming you do new things more often.
I think I'm drawn to programming because the fiddliness is tractable, and fixable.
In which other domain can I:
* introspect the relevant processes/state, step by step
* snapshot/undo
* fix niggles, once and for all, and for everyone; and get their fixes too
* probe and test my inputs and outputs, checking for quality. Get notified if a part changes in a way that breaks me.
And the only tool I need is a commodity general purpose PC.
When I try woodwork, or even electronics, I'm struck by much friction is in even simple tasks: tools, parts, lead time, safety, space, physical effort, cost, ...
The fiddliness isn't necessarily fixable though, at least in business code. The code has to represent the real-world, and if the real-world is fiddly then the code must be fiddly too. The only way to 'fix' this is to restrict your code's representation of the world to some non-fiddly sub-set, but this isn't always possible.
Contemplating the details of a thing is really satisfying. At times I find myself sitting there and trying to decompose the astonishing amount of work, research, both evolutionary and revolutionary progress that has gone into reaching the current level of something. Buying myself a coffee and stare at the local ferry and acknowledge that someones life's work went into figuring out how to make the paint stick to metal.
Naturally the other point also sticks.. I too often get stuck on the details. :P
I think we have all written some code that looks bulletproof to us. We run a set of tests with all the inputs we can think of, and it passes with flying colors (after several iterations of course).
Then we give it to someone else and it fails on their first or second attempt. They simply tried to use it in a way that we did not anticipate. It doesn't mean that we are dumb for not thinking of those possibilities; it just means that we did not think of every one of them.
And it pretty much is most times. For us. But indeed I did run into the "why would they use it like that though" scenario, where it fails. So I have to patch that usecase. At which point I go all "ok now it's really done" until another fringe usecase pops up and so on and so forth. And I did think about how sure I was it was bulletproof, humbling moment.
I have read this article already and "reality has a surprising amount of detail" has become a phrase for me. But, I read it again today because the writing is so good. This guy is a gifted writer.
This hits for to me because I'm currently adding on to my house. Or rather, paying professionals to add on to my house, because I actually want it to get finished.
I visit every couple of days. It's REMARKABLE how fast things get done. One day, there were no walls. The next day, almost all of the walls were in place!
... and yet, at the same time, things take a long amount of time because reality has a surprising amount of detail. I haven't taken into account how much you have to do to frame a house. So incredible amounts of work get done, day after day, but 3/4 of them are things I had no idea needed to get done! Gazing up into the roof, the detail is incredible. The PSL beams, the brackets, the joists, the trusses, just.. EVERYTHING!
I thought the structural engineer's plans had an incredible amount of detail on them, and they do, but they also don't really say anything about _how_ to build the thing. How to put up the walls, how to hold them together temporarily, how to lift beams into place. In what order things can and should be done. That all just takes experience.
Yes but what about AI? (Perhaps the most annoying words written in the last few years mostly on LinkedIn).
But actually in the years since this was written, I do think the world has shifted. Doing things on a computer used to be really hard. Even just installing a framework or getting >python to call the right python on windows. Then install Django and get Django to work with nginx etc. It was just a lot of thankless, frustrating work to get from zero to 1%.
Aside from AI, the tools and packages and culture of computing has gotten better. But AI means you just get all the trivial but difficult stuff for free. And I think a lot of people who would have given up now make it through to see something work and they’ll feel the thrill of building something. It’s just better and easier now.
One thing he didn't mention is getting the first and last steps to be the same vertical distance as the others. Nothing will trip you up (literally!) so easily as a final step that is a different height than the other steps.
I thought of this because this morning I was putting a small fence around some plants we want to protect from deer. The fence consisted of 20 sections (bought on Amazon), each about 24 inches wide. Our ground is like rock, and the fence was not that sturdy, so I had to pound a heavy spike into the ground to the depth of the fence posts, then pull the spike out and put each section's legs in, leaving room for the next section's leg to go into the same spike hole. I wanted to be sure I was putting each section in at the right position, lest I end up with a 12 inch gap and have to go back and adjust lots of sections. Long story short, I pretty much succeeded, although when it cools down I may adjust a few sections. But the problem was sort of like the stairs: I wanted an integer number of fence sections, each the same length, to exactly fit around the bushes---just like you want an integer number of vertical steps in a diagonal stair, each of the same (more or less standard) height.
> Surprising detail is a near universal property of getting up close and personal with reality.
> As you learn, notice which details actually change how you think.
Lovely article. The older I get the more I appreciate this.
One point worth making: in many cases, after learning to see & appreciate the details, you gain the power to ignore the details that don't matter to you. This can be quite freeing.
55 comments
[ 4.4 ms ] story [ 72.7 ms ] threadIt’s always a little disappointing to me when I think I’ve run into something unique but it ends up being user error or something.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16184255 - Jan 19, 2018
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22020495 - Jan 11, 2020
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29429385 - Dec 3, 2021
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38407851 - Nov 24, 2023
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43087779 - Feb 21, 2025
In the end I screwed some wall shelves in and called it good enough.
Also learned that lath and plaster needs some special consideration when screwing/nailing things for securement, as the lath (wood strips) could split, causing a subsequent crack in the plaster. Basically for screws or bigger nails, it’s a good idea to drill a small hole first to lessen the pressure, or do a bigger hole and use a spring bolt anchor.
The walls aren't straight, either vertically or horizontally, and they're not even consistently wonky along any given axis.
So I installed uprights vertically, using transparent polycarbonate spacers of different depths at the attachment points[0]. I then installed shelves on the uprights and aligned them horizontally.
The variation is only +/- 6mm or so (for around 12mm variation across the 2.5m x 2.44m wall) but, if I hadn't done this, my shelves wouldn't be level, and wouldn't even be consistently non-level, so would have been awkward to install along the full length of the wall, would all be misaligned with eachother, and would have looked incredibly janky.
[0] In hindsight I wish I'd gone for these in different colours rather than just plain transparent, to make more of a feature of them. The walls are white so I think orange, blue, red, and yellow would have worked well.
I put up a notice board in my kitchen when I moved into a new place, and it looked squint even though my level said it was straight. I flipped the spirit level end-for-end, still straight - if the level was off and the workpiece was straight, then flipping it would make it read wrong.
Nope. Level was okay. Checked the wall, wall is plumb. Wait a sec - the wallpaper is not straight.
So the notice board went on lined up with the wallpaper, not reality.
The other one was fitting a six metre aluminium pole with a two metre aerial on top to a brand new multi-million pound building. The brackets and pole were absolutely straight and plumb. Got back down off the cherry picker, walked back across the yard to the van, pole looks really squint.
After much upping and downing and to-ing and fro-ing, it became clear that I needed to pack the aerial pole mounting to lean it over by a couple of degrees so it didn't look wrong!
The pole was straight, the multi-million pound brand new high end amazing building was distinctly on the piss with not one truly plumb vertical component anywhere.
This must be a well-known fact to all trades people who work on cupboards, tiling, door mounting, etc. But when you understand this, then you realize that everything is built to be forgiving of this reality.
E.g. prefabricated bedroom cupboards will always be fitted with fillers on each side and a kickboard for the bottom. This allows you to use feet/wedges underneath the cupboard to make it stand-up perfectly straight (which is not necessarily parallel with the floor and/or walls), but because of the fillers/kickboard being wide/tall enough and cut to fit the irregular/skew shape, you don't tend to notice.
Beading around wooden door frames is for the same reason, it hides the little gap that is invariably at points around it, either due to the hole in the wall being skew and/or slightly arched.
[citation needed]
It's unknowable whether this is true.
I think I'm drawn to programming because the fiddliness is tractable, and fixable.
In which other domain can I:
* introspect the relevant processes/state, step by step
* snapshot/undo
* fix niggles, once and for all, and for everyone; and get their fixes too
* probe and test my inputs and outputs, checking for quality. Get notified if a part changes in a way that breaks me.
And the only tool I need is a commodity general purpose PC.
When I try woodwork, or even electronics, I'm struck by much friction is in even simple tasks: tools, parts, lead time, safety, space, physical effort, cost, ...
Contemplating the details of a thing is really satisfying. At times I find myself sitting there and trying to decompose the astonishing amount of work, research, both evolutionary and revolutionary progress that has gone into reaching the current level of something. Buying myself a coffee and stare at the local ferry and acknowledge that someones life's work went into figuring out how to make the paint stick to metal.
Naturally the other point also sticks.. I too often get stuck on the details. :P
> you could be intellectually stuck right at this very moment, with the evidence right in front of your face and you just can’t see it.
Then we give it to someone else and it fails on their first or second attempt. They simply tried to use it in a way that we did not anticipate. It doesn't mean that we are dumb for not thinking of those possibilities; it just means that we did not think of every one of them.
And it pretty much is most times. For us. But indeed I did run into the "why would they use it like that though" scenario, where it fails. So I have to patch that usecase. At which point I go all "ok now it's really done" until another fringe usecase pops up and so on and so forth. And I did think about how sure I was it was bulletproof, humbling moment.
https://contraptions.venkateshrao.com/p/truth-in-inconvenien...
I visit every couple of days. It's REMARKABLE how fast things get done. One day, there were no walls. The next day, almost all of the walls were in place!
... and yet, at the same time, things take a long amount of time because reality has a surprising amount of detail. I haven't taken into account how much you have to do to frame a house. So incredible amounts of work get done, day after day, but 3/4 of them are things I had no idea needed to get done! Gazing up into the roof, the detail is incredible. The PSL beams, the brackets, the joists, the trusses, just.. EVERYTHING!
I thought the structural engineer's plans had an incredible amount of detail on them, and they do, but they also don't really say anything about _how_ to build the thing. How to put up the walls, how to hold them together temporarily, how to lift beams into place. In what order things can and should be done. That all just takes experience.
But actually in the years since this was written, I do think the world has shifted. Doing things on a computer used to be really hard. Even just installing a framework or getting >python to call the right python on windows. Then install Django and get Django to work with nginx etc. It was just a lot of thankless, frustrating work to get from zero to 1%.
Aside from AI, the tools and packages and culture of computing has gotten better. But AI means you just get all the trivial but difficult stuff for free. And I think a lot of people who would have given up now make it through to see something work and they’ll feel the thrill of building something. It’s just better and easier now.
I thought of this because this morning I was putting a small fence around some plants we want to protect from deer. The fence consisted of 20 sections (bought on Amazon), each about 24 inches wide. Our ground is like rock, and the fence was not that sturdy, so I had to pound a heavy spike into the ground to the depth of the fence posts, then pull the spike out and put each section's legs in, leaving room for the next section's leg to go into the same spike hole. I wanted to be sure I was putting each section in at the right position, lest I end up with a 12 inch gap and have to go back and adjust lots of sections. Long story short, I pretty much succeeded, although when it cools down I may adjust a few sections. But the problem was sort of like the stairs: I wanted an integer number of fence sections, each the same length, to exactly fit around the bushes---just like you want an integer number of vertical steps in a diagonal stair, each of the same (more or less standard) height.
> As you learn, notice which details actually change how you think.
Lovely article. The older I get the more I appreciate this.
One point worth making: in many cases, after learning to see & appreciate the details, you gain the power to ignore the details that don't matter to you. This can be quite freeing.
No matter how many data centers are built, it is impossible to accommodate that level of detail.