We tried to hang a pretty picture on a wall, but accidentally opened a small hole. This hole caused the entire building to collapse. While we did not intend to create a hole, and feel terrible for all the people impacted by the collapse, we believe it’s also worth investigating what failures of compliance testing & building design could allow such a small hole to cause such big damage.

Multiple parties involved, myself included, are still students and/or do not code professionally. How could we have been allowed to do this by accident?

It’s certainly no laughing matter, neither to the people who rely on npm nor the kids who did this.

But man, it is comical to see the Law of Unintended Consequences when it decides to rear its ugly head.

I applaud the students who had the original idea and decided to see what would happen if you installed every single npm package at once. It’s a good question, to which the answer is: uncover a fairly significant issue with how npm maintains integrity across all of its packages.

But I guess the main reason I’m sharing this article is as a case study on how hard it is to moderate a system.

I’m still a recovering perfectionist, and the older I get, the more I come across examples (both online like this and also in my real life) where you can do everything right and still end up losing big.

The best thing you can do when you see something like this is to pat your fellow human on the back and say, “man, that really sucks, I’m sorry.”

The worst thing you can do, as evidenced in this story, is to cuss out some teenagers.

This came up in my recommendations tonight, and it is certainly intriguing to me.

I have heard of Carl Jung before, but I don’t know much about his research.

This concept of dealing with your shadow and bringing it to light feels like what I’ve been going through for months now.

There is too much in this article to even grab a single pull quote from. The entire thing is worth reading from top to bottom.

It did make me think a bit about how I can apply some of this knowledge to my own life. I personally struggle with “what will I be when I grow up” from time to time, and I think even simply knowing that this is not abnormal is helpful.

We arduously convince young children to believe in Santa, and they do. Testimony dictates religious beliefs, too. For example, psychologist Rebekah Richert has found that if you frame a fantastical story as a religious story, children raised in religious households will believe it. If you don't frame it religiously, they'll call your bluff.

When we get to college, however, cultural testimony changes. An analytical, scientific view reigns, and there's little room for God. We staggered home from parties pontificating on the pointless evil of Western religion. We made friends by cynically confessing our doubt. College is "very likely to challenge the more conservative belief systems we have in our brains," Grafman says. It deflates our adolescent faith.

I know, I know, it’s another 10 Reasons Why list… but dang nabbit, there are some solid pieces of financial advice in here!

My personal favorite:

When someone gives you two reasons or excuses for not doing something, neither one of them is true and both are invalid. You haven’t gotten to the truth yet. Imagine asking a friend to go to a baseball game and he says “I can’t, my in-laws are coming over tonight.” Then you tell him it’s actually a day game. “Oh, I’m also sick. Not feeling well.” His in-laws aren’t coming over and he’s not sick either. There’s something else going on. If you understand this aspect of human nature, you are equipped to talk to investors.