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by inersha 2729 days ago
Classic hacker news. Ask for technical advice, get called incompetent.
2 comments

If they asked a bunch of doctors how anesthesia worked, they were just about to go perform surgery at home, you'd expect the doctors to warn that it was a bad idea, no?
I suppose there may be a distinction between asking "how does anaesthesia work?" and "should I perform surgery at home?".
"A is to B as X is to Y", compares A and X, not A and B. It puts A in the context of B, as X is in the context of Y.

the comparison is between "how does anaesthesia work?" (A) and "how does auth work?" (X), relative to "about to perform surgery at home" (B) and "about to implement a service containing medical information" (Y).

The point is: he's about to do something big, and is asking a basic question. The real problem is not the basic question (auth) but the context he's doing it in.

If a nurse in training, in a classroom setting, asked about anaesthesia, it'd be fine. If they're a doctor, about to operate on a live patient, it's different.

I like the analogy in your final paragraph. I see hacker news as the nurse in the classroom setting.
Very few people in the field are competent to design security for health systems. No shame in being like most professional software developers. Immense shame in causing a life-altering breach because you couldn’t recognize the limits of your expertise.