Ask HN: When has humanities/history knowledge helped you in tech?
2•amadeuswoo•2h ago
Personally, I've been reading about how historical empires handled delegation and trust—who gets autonomy, who needs oversight, how that scales. Finding it weirdly applicable to how I think about system design and working with AI tools.
Curious if others have pulled from history/humanities in ways that actually transferred.
Comments
jbreckmckye•1h ago
I think a lot of programming - the more business focused, application minded stuff - is a kind of analytical philosophy. You spend a lot of time as a dev working on "domain logic" which requires you to be very exacting in your terminology and carefully distinguish between ideas.
You can go too far with this, and waste time on taxonomy, but for the most part it's a good idea to subject your classes, variables, components to some kind of philosophical scrutiny.
(My degree was in English Literature though, which doesn't help as much, though I think I'm pretty good at naming variables. £40,000 well spent!)
amadeuswoo•1h ago
Always appreciate an English major in the wild. But I think taxonomy is only wasteful if it doesn't map to real distinctions, good naming saves debugging time like when untangling "what did we mean by 'user' here?".
Wittgenstein said the limits of language are the limits of the world after all
elbci•1h ago
separation of concerns -> division of labor (hint: there's always a power imbalance even if it's hidden under reification)
jbreckmckye•1h ago
You can go too far with this, and waste time on taxonomy, but for the most part it's a good idea to subject your classes, variables, components to some kind of philosophical scrutiny.
(My degree was in English Literature though, which doesn't help as much, though I think I'm pretty good at naming variables. £40,000 well spent!)
amadeuswoo•1h ago
Wittgenstein said the limits of language are the limits of the world after all