> The discussion in The Republic maintains that would-be citizens of the ideal republic should be exposed to music that cultivates their good qualities, and prohibited from listening to the bad. Much modern music creates agitation and aggression. I’ll listen to serene and balanced songs like Gregorian chant and neoclassical
> The etching, and even the pressing and collating of pages were difficult processes but somehow the artists outdid us, we who can so easily create, modify and distribute images. Goodbye cartoonish web images, let me be immersed in nature and see uninhibited art instead.
The author should be careful not to confuse a desire for focus and on the lasting rather than the ephemeral with a fetishisation of the past, of the "authentic", and of the "natural". It is all too tempting to step from use of survivorship bias as a tool, as a filter, into a false belief in the superiority of things past.
> the (false?) feeling of connectedness through a glowing rectangle
This particularly gets to me. I know people who would not be here on this earth today if not for the ability to connect with others through the internet. If you feel like disconnecting makes your life more fulfilling, great! But don't project that onto others by saying that what makes their life meaningful is false. (At least he had the self-awareness to throw in a question-mark.)
Modes of communication are just that, different modes. No less intrinsically superior or inferior to one another, merely different. Literature is just words but it has great potency in communication. It can transform one's mind, it can lead to new vistas of understanding, perception, reason, and thought. It can serve as a bridge of understanding between individuals, cultures, eras, religions. It can evoke the full gamut of emotion and feeling, it can reveal the numinous, the extraordinary, the sublime, and the awe-inspiring. Many religions put their roots in literary works precisely because of the incredible potency such works can have. But the written word is hardly unique, many other forms of art can be just as potent and rich, such as music, painting, sculpture, motion pictures, and even teevee. Even blogs, twitter, instagram, youtube, or vine.
When we look at new sources of communication we often judge them based on their average use case, but this ignores the fact that the majority of nearly any form of communication is dominated by the routine and banal. When we judge literature we judge it based on its greatest successes and ignore the mountain of mediocrity underneath the pinnacle, we would be wise to do the same elsewhere. It's easy to denigrate little glowing rectangles, but it's easy to denigrate scribbles on sheets of pressed wood pulp too. But both can serve as the foundation for meaningful connections between individuals, both can provide windows into the transcendent and the numinous, and both can have profoundly transformative impacts on emotions, lives, cognition, values, perspective, everything.
I predict that this will go full circular again in a few years, and we're back to the "leave meatspace, enter the cyber world" over-enthusiasm again. And then a few years after it's vinyl/Thoreau again etc.
Everyone knows that the musical expressions of 14th-16th century white European men cultivate the most appealing qualities and are the least ephemeral.
I'm sure there's an 18th century biological treatise establishing that.
> To program any more was pointless. My programs would never live as long as [Kafka’s] The Trial.
As a programmer, I want to believe I'm a writer, a poet, a sculptor.
But the truth is programmers are dancers, mimes, ventriloquists. We're performance artists, and the systems we program really only have meaning as long as we keep programming them (or, if we're really lucky, someone else takes up the dance when we grow tired of it). Once we take our final bows, the programs will fade away and die and all that will be left is a memory of the performance.
I don't think this is true. Consider the popularity of emulators for older systems. People still care about and use old programs and games. You can even still buy games released 35+ years ago from online retailers like gog. Think about how old programs like ls, dd, etc are (even older when you consider the design and not just the implementation).
People still care about "Super Mario Bros" (a computer program) today, over 30 years after it's original release. Is it really going to be forgotten in the next 10 years? 20? 30? I think not. Will all emulators be abandoned?
Maybe appreciation for old computer programs is a niche interest, but let's face it, Kafka is not exactly popular among the masses either.
Most software may be forgotten, but most books will be too.
> To program any more was pointless. My programs would never live as long as [Kafka’s] The Trial.
I found it a touch ironic considering that Kafka, on his deathbed, asked his friend Max Brod to destroy all of Kafka's unpublished work, including The Trial.
I prefer the term `software gardener' to `software engineer' for this reason: software is slowly created over time and requires constant care, or it will wilt and die.
Construction/architecture-metaphors work a bit too: They can outlive the involvement of the initial designer, many bits can be tacked on or changed, and they have some overriding functional requirements.
I see myself as a bonsai artist. Bonsai trees need to be cared for, trimmed, styled, wired, etc. They grow over time. You can change things, but you can't realistically change everything without starting again. A bonsai tree is not "done" until it is dead.
I generally agree, but I have been surprised. We had a bug in a program my company released in the late 90's and that bug only became apparent last year. 5-6 people contacted us for a fix (which we provided). The program was more than 15 years old and it was still in production. That surprised me and made me adjust my views of each of my software releases. They might be deployed in the field for far longer than I had assumed.
The irony is that a digital information is theoretically lossless, but in practice software and hardware changes so fast that it is one of the most ephemeral things humanity has ever created.
So if you got into programming because you wanted to create something lasting, I think you are destined to be disappointed. But then again, all human endeavor, and indeed everything in our human experience, even the seas and the mountains and the stars are all ephemeral on some time scale. As the Buddhists say, the temporary nature of things is unavoidable and neutral, it's ones desire for permanence that causes a problem.
I don't like the theory that a piece of software can't be complete. Not all software can be complete, but some simple tools (which most software should be made of) can and should be able to be finished forever, or at least asymptotically approach completeness to a degree that the distance becomes irrelevant.
Programmers are indeed like writers, but some of us get to write Beowulf, some others get to write college term papers and the rest of us lie somewhere in between.
As a programmer, I want to believe I'm a writer, a poet, a sculptor.
But the truth is programmers are dancers, mimes, ventriloquists. We're performance artists, and the systems we program really only have meaning as long as we keep programming them (or, if we're really lucky, someone else takes up the dance when we grow tired of it). Once we take our final bows, the programs will fade away and die and all that will be left is a memory of the performance.
Nah, it doesn't have to be that way, although it often is.
We're like artists or architects, but most of what we build isn't lasting because there's little demand for that, just as many architects will never get paid to work on anything that might last. The Sistene Chapel lasted; the slums of Rome from almost any era haven't. For every artist whose work makes it into a museum, there are thousands hawking cheap prints on the streets of Paris.
Programmers can build software that will last for a long time. I know people whose programs are still running, untouched, after 30 years. We can solve problems and keep them solved. It doesn't have to be just code; papers and new algorithms can advance the state of the field. Since we're a progressive sort who really believe in the ability of our "magic power" to blow away drudgery, we love when we're able to do that: to solve a problem and keep it solved. If this is applied to code, you can get exponential growth in codebase or library or ecosystem value for a long time.
Here's the problem, though: no one is willing to pay for code that lasts. Just as most architects are building clapboard houses in the suburbs, most of us get stuck writing throwaway code because The Business won't pay for good code by giving us the autonomy and timeframes that'd enable it to exist. Of course, bad code and failed software projeects are far more costly in the long term, but executives are not a tribe known for thinking long term; most corporate climbers have the political skill to get promoted away from their externalized costs before anything can be linked to them.
What a waste. I am amazed that you can take the attitude of "All new things are broken" and be involved in the creation of anything new at all. To me you need to have one of two outlooks on life to hold that viewpoint. Either you really think that you are independently of anyone else so awesome that you will create something of value by yourself that is somehow better then what anyone else is doing, or you think that you yourself are so much better then everyone else that things which hold value to others are meaningless to you. Either way you're placing so much value on yourself that whatever comes out will be so isolated as to be useless to everyone else, but why do you care since you're so much better then everyone else.
I mean consider the blog post "I am going write only" which loosely translates to what I produce is worth your time to read, but what you produce is not worth my time to read. No thank you.
I like this post a lot, because it reminds me a lot of myself. I have spent a long time thinking about how the deluge of easy entertainment and shallow articles on the Internet has affected the way people operate. I've even done a similar experiment in the past, except in my case it was banning the Internet except for a specific set of use cases. It was certainly an interesting experience.
One warning I will throw out for those considering entertainment/distraction deprivation: you will need something to spend your time on. Instead of just taking away, use the same opportunity to try to cultivate a productive habit (hey, you're going to be suffering anyway -- might as well).
Also, you need to think about whether this really addresses the issues that cause you to be "mediocre"/lazy/unproductive. It's easy to blame external factors like the Internet for providing easy entertainment, but it's also important to look inward and see if you have mental roadblocks that are inhibiting you -- perhaps you are mentally exhausted from work, or maybe you just aren't interested. Also, I've started to think that some people are just flat out less productive than others. Or to put it another way, some people are abnormally productive. After all, productivity is really more of a means than an end. If you're not sure where you are going, it doesn't matter how fast you get there. And if you do have a goal, abstract ideas like quality or productivity are quickly redefined in more concrete terms to fit your new intention.
He has delusions of grandeur. He compares himself to Kafka and says he insulates himself from "online mediocrity". Does he realize how incredibly arrogant he sounds? What he needs right now is to acknowledge that he's just another ordinary human, capable of ordinary deeds (basically an "ego adjustment" to realistic levels). He should do what he loves doing how he loves doing it, without any thoughts about how it measures up against peers or great artists from the past. That's how great art comes into being. But hey - if being a judgmental prick is part of his creative process, then so be it.
I got the exact same feeling while reading the post, while I don't necessarily agree at the efficacy of your biting response. However, the excessive quoting of "great" thinkers easily came off as delusions of grandeur.
Anyone can take quotations out of context and use them to sound well-read; what about adding more of your thoughts to the mix?
> My first concrete step will be to eliminate variable information rewards from my computing life.
By posting your article to HN? I appreciated the article and found it interesting, but it seems odd that you're the one posting it given the sentiment behind the article.
Posting to HN is consistent with his plan, as long as he doesn't respond to comments.
He has said he will be write-only. He can post tweets, hn articles, etc. However, he cannot read the responses and comments to his output more than once a week.
Remember how deep and cool we thought the guy from The Guy I Almost Was was when he decided to check out of techno-hip cybersociety, become a citizen of the past, and search for true meaning in old, or absent, technology?
Yeah, turns out he was just going full hipster. Which is just as bad in its own way.
Balance. In all things, balance. Not very profound to say. You can't make a manifesto out of it, because duh. But yeah. It's what works, I think.
> A computer will never live as long as The Trial. … What if Amerika was only written for 32-bit Power PC?
This line kind of got me, and made me think about the transience of my own work. I build educational software, and I entered this field because I was inspired by the educational games I played as a kid. Most of those games, developed for a specific operating system, can still be run today on a VM or an emulator of an older Windows machine. But the apps I work on are web applications - we're constantly racing to update and maintain them in a sea of ever-changing devices and standards. The odds of somebody being able to run my work, even a just few years from now, and have it work without issue is unfortunately kind of small (the introduction of iOS 8 already wreaked havoc on some of our layouts). And that makes me kind of sad.
I've been thinking about this problem lately as well. I think one solution might be to build your games for a well specified abstract machine. Then, you can just build an implementation of that machine for the web, and run the games on that.
The inspiration for the idea was SCUMM, and how we're able to play SCUMM games now with SCUMMVM.
So his plan is no online news; only write to GitHub and Twitter, not read; only old time tested books. I don't think you can be a good coder like this.
A lot of improvements to software development are too new to be time tested and encoded into book form. For example, Node scales a lot better than Rails, and maybe there are books about that now and not just everyone hearing about companies that switched, but beginner Node programmers are going to get stuck in massive ugly callback pyramids unless they learn mitigation techniques like Promises.
There's simply too many things a good coder should know that are picked up by reading other people's code. What if you didn't know about A* path finding and had a bunch of buggy, slow, piles of loops and if statements? Then you are doing shoddy work and you are charging your clients more for reinventing and debugging the wheel when you should have just looked up the algorithm.
The other problem I see is that he wants to live in the city, unlike the people he cited who moved to cheaper less busy places like Walden Pond, but he is focusing more on art than work, so it will be tougher for him to make rent. Maybe Loop/Recur is paying him enough he has time for that, though, who knows. Many people in big, expensive cities like NYC have to struggle with multiple jobs.
It depends a lot on what you are doing and your innate abilities and determination. Knuth has captured some thoughts about staying connected via email very eloquently so I will share them here -
"Email is a wonderful thing for people whose role in life is to be on top of things. But not for me; my role is to be on the bottom of things. What I do takes long hours of studying and uninterruptible concentration. I try to learn certain areas of computer science exhaustively; then I try to digest that knowledge into a form that is accessible to people who don't have time for such study. "
People ignoring old works is why we have node and people trying to put polish it with promises, rather than people just using Haskell or Erlang or something else with lightweight threads. Or at least something inspired by them.
This post is a beautiful illustration of self-determination. Often on HN I read about the tyranny of employers, government and co-workers and often I identify with the aggrieved poster. But Begriff's post is a welcome reminder for me that most of us already have everything we need to exercise what Locke (and I think Begriff) would call our "natural rights", except the will to do so. After reading this post I have less regard for my own complaints about 'self' unless accompanied by determination.
begriffs will create new content, but only read the work of others if it is decades/centuries old? That sort of delayed feedback loop is no way to participate in a community, or even in a discussion larger than comments on your own work.
The survivorship bias is a logical fallacy, not a prescription for choosing what to read!
Why disable images in your browser, when many concepts are best expressed with a diagram or photograph?
It's important to consciously limit your content consumption, but this is not the way to do it.
> That sort of delayed feedback loop is no way to participate in a community
Who says he's participating in any particular community?
> The survivorship bias is a logical fallacy, not a prescription for choosing what to read!
So you suggest reading works that didn't survive? How would you go about finding content that is by definition dead?
> Why disable images in your browser, when many concepts are best expressed with a diagram or photograph?
Yeah, you've got me there. I understand his viewpoint on this, but the execution is problematic. I'd wager the vast majority of images on websites have nothing to do with the content you're reading. Even images that are technically a part of the article you're reading frequently add nothing to the text. How do you filter the useful from the superfluous?
There are things that last because they were done once and were done, mostly, right. Then there are things that have lasted because they were done once, mostly wrong, and still provided enough value at the time that they became popular among the group with the power to determine what would be the dominant solution before they could be refined.
The flip-side of permanence is path-dependency. So many programs get written for a certain architecture of chip and instruction set, for instance, that to change it to something more efficient would break too many things.
To make something that lasts because it is good, that lasts on its own virtues, would be a wonderful thing. Nonetheless, the next generation ought to be able to surpass us - and if they are not able to do so, we have done something wrong. Blanket approval of past solutions simply because they have lasted seems likely to lead one wrong.
I'd be surprised if this was the attitude of the people whose work he intends to read. I expect they were mostly very in touch with all the other art of their time.
If you find your problem is reading - I would argue you are reading the wrong things and not balancing your input with your output.
I agree that limiting your input might help improve your output. It could also harm your output as you are having less ideas being inputted to feed inspiration.
This would be too hard for me to maintain, but I'm sure it will bring benefits for as long as it can be sustained. The content we expose ourselves to definitely affects our subconscious thoughts. However, I instead prefer to envelop myself in things I enjoy and attempt to recognize and improve the quality of things I enjoy over time. For example, reddit is a low-quality entertainment source. The more I recognize it the less I enjoy it, and the less time I spend on it. Progress depends on exposing myself to things I don't know how to enjoy and attempting to find ways to enjoy them. My preferences have shifted from consuming to creating over time. The adjustments required for my philosophy are much smaller and easier than for this 'write-only' philosophy.
Part of the narcissism comes in because because he want to broadcast not communicate. I don't disagree that email can be a distraction, but only answering your email once a week makes communication impossible. Twitter would be useless (more than I already believe it is) if everyone decided to use it as broadcast medium and never read anything. What's the point if there are no readers?
You can do broadcasting if your Linus Torvalds, if not you might need to check your email a little more frequently.
I agree with the sentiment in this that contemporary media is distracting and oversaturated.
But when he says:
>The simple test of time does yield false negatives.
I wonder what makes him so sure it doesn't yield false positives. My own view on aesthetics is that they're highly personal - something "timeless" might not appeal to you at all. Timeless works are the ones which happen, overall, to appeal to the most people - it doesn't mean they necessarily are higher "quality." It also has to do with how accessible they are, how ubiquitous (/ marketed), etc.
(Sidenote, but his arguments against startup aesthetics could also apply to modernism and many other movements. It's about distilling something to it's essence, removing superfluous details in favor of clarity. For all the faults "flat" design has, I think it is a noble cause even if it takes some missteps.)
There is a lot of contemporary work (programming, music, art, etc) that I find compelling, and personally I want to embrace it. Understanding the contemporary helps you understand the current moment of time, and where things are going. It lets you see larger trends and where you might want to fit in. I'm not very afraid of embracing something that turns out to be a false start - at least, at the moment, I was doing what I thought was best. Maybe this is a fallacy of youth.
I'm all for embracing the classics, the tried and true. But I think applying lessons learned from them to the unproven ideas is where things get interesting.
[+] [-] rntz|11 years ago|reply
> The etching, and even the pressing and collating of pages were difficult processes but somehow the artists outdid us, we who can so easily create, modify and distribute images. Goodbye cartoonish web images, let me be immersed in nature and see uninhibited art instead.
The author should be careful not to confuse a desire for focus and on the lasting rather than the ephemeral with a fetishisation of the past, of the "authentic", and of the "natural". It is all too tempting to step from use of survivorship bias as a tool, as a filter, into a false belief in the superiority of things past.
> the (false?) feeling of connectedness through a glowing rectangle
This particularly gets to me. I know people who would not be here on this earth today if not for the ability to connect with others through the internet. If you feel like disconnecting makes your life more fulfilling, great! But don't project that onto others by saying that what makes their life meaningful is false. (At least he had the self-awareness to throw in a question-mark.)
[+] [-] InclinedPlane|11 years ago|reply
When we look at new sources of communication we often judge them based on their average use case, but this ignores the fact that the majority of nearly any form of communication is dominated by the routine and banal. When we judge literature we judge it based on its greatest successes and ignore the mountain of mediocrity underneath the pinnacle, we would be wise to do the same elsewhere. It's easy to denigrate little glowing rectangles, but it's easy to denigrate scribbles on sheets of pressed wood pulp too. But both can serve as the foundation for meaningful connections between individuals, both can provide windows into the transcendent and the numinous, and both can have profoundly transformative impacts on emotions, lives, cognition, values, perspective, everything.
[+] [-] mhd|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DubiousPusher|11 years ago|reply
I'm sure there's an 18th century biological treatise establishing that.
[+] [-] unknown|11 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] saalweachter|11 years ago|reply
As a programmer, I want to believe I'm a writer, a poet, a sculptor.
But the truth is programmers are dancers, mimes, ventriloquists. We're performance artists, and the systems we program really only have meaning as long as we keep programming them (or, if we're really lucky, someone else takes up the dance when we grow tired of it). Once we take our final bows, the programs will fade away and die and all that will be left is a memory of the performance.
[+] [-] timharding|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tbirdz|11 years ago|reply
People still care about "Super Mario Bros" (a computer program) today, over 30 years after it's original release. Is it really going to be forgotten in the next 10 years? 20? 30? I think not. Will all emulators be abandoned?
Maybe appreciation for old computer programs is a niche interest, but let's face it, Kafka is not exactly popular among the masses either.
Most software may be forgotten, but most books will be too.
[+] [-] huxley|11 years ago|reply
I found it a touch ironic considering that Kafka, on his deathbed, asked his friend Max Brod to destroy all of Kafka's unpublished work, including The Trial.
[+] [-] wcummings|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Terr_|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mikekchar|11 years ago|reply
I think this is the same as software.
[+] [-] e40|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dasil003|11 years ago|reply
So if you got into programming because you wanted to create something lasting, I think you are destined to be disappointed. But then again, all human endeavor, and indeed everything in our human experience, even the seas and the mountains and the stars are all ephemeral on some time scale. As the Buddhists say, the temporary nature of things is unavoidable and neutral, it's ones desire for permanence that causes a problem.
[+] [-] colechristensen|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] trustfundbaby|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|11 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] michaelochurch|11 years ago|reply
But the truth is programmers are dancers, mimes, ventriloquists. We're performance artists, and the systems we program really only have meaning as long as we keep programming them (or, if we're really lucky, someone else takes up the dance when we grow tired of it). Once we take our final bows, the programs will fade away and die and all that will be left is a memory of the performance.
Nah, it doesn't have to be that way, although it often is.
We're like artists or architects, but most of what we build isn't lasting because there's little demand for that, just as many architects will never get paid to work on anything that might last. The Sistene Chapel lasted; the slums of Rome from almost any era haven't. For every artist whose work makes it into a museum, there are thousands hawking cheap prints on the streets of Paris.
Programmers can build software that will last for a long time. I know people whose programs are still running, untouched, after 30 years. We can solve problems and keep them solved. It doesn't have to be just code; papers and new algorithms can advance the state of the field. Since we're a progressive sort who really believe in the ability of our "magic power" to blow away drudgery, we love when we're able to do that: to solve a problem and keep it solved. If this is applied to code, you can get exponential growth in codebase or library or ecosystem value for a long time.
Here's the problem, though: no one is willing to pay for code that lasts. Just as most architects are building clapboard houses in the suburbs, most of us get stuck writing throwaway code because The Business won't pay for good code by giving us the autonomy and timeframes that'd enable it to exist. Of course, bad code and failed software projeects are far more costly in the long term, but executives are not a tribe known for thinking long term; most corporate climbers have the political skill to get promoted away from their externalized costs before anything can be linked to them.
[+] [-] dkhenry|11 years ago|reply
I mean consider the blog post "I am going write only" which loosely translates to what I produce is worth your time to read, but what you produce is not worth my time to read. No thank you.
[+] [-] allendoerfer|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] delluminatus|11 years ago|reply
One warning I will throw out for those considering entertainment/distraction deprivation: you will need something to spend your time on. Instead of just taking away, use the same opportunity to try to cultivate a productive habit (hey, you're going to be suffering anyway -- might as well).
Also, you need to think about whether this really addresses the issues that cause you to be "mediocre"/lazy/unproductive. It's easy to blame external factors like the Internet for providing easy entertainment, but it's also important to look inward and see if you have mental roadblocks that are inhibiting you -- perhaps you are mentally exhausted from work, or maybe you just aren't interested. Also, I've started to think that some people are just flat out less productive than others. Or to put it another way, some people are abnormally productive. After all, productivity is really more of a means than an end. If you're not sure where you are going, it doesn't matter how fast you get there. And if you do have a goal, abstract ideas like quality or productivity are quickly redefined in more concrete terms to fit your new intention.
[+] [-] Kenji|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ky3|11 years ago|reply
What he needs right now is to acknowledge that he's just another ordinary human
OP is on an experiment to put his ordinariness as a human being to the test. I'm grateful for a view from the sidelines.
"A man is called selfish not for pursuing his own good but for neglecting his neighbor's." -- Whately
And a man is called arrogant not for how much he strives to better himself but for how he belittles his neighbor.
Sorry that you feel belittled.
[+] [-] matthewwiese|11 years ago|reply
Anyone can take quotations out of context and use them to sound well-read; what about adding more of your thoughts to the mix?
[+] [-] scott_karana|11 years ago|reply
Human language is a longer scale of change, no doubt, but in Neo-Sanfransokyo in the year 2599, will English even resemble itself now?
[+] [-] qrohlf|11 years ago|reply
By posting your article to HN? I appreciated the article and found it interesting, but it seems odd that you're the one posting it given the sentiment behind the article.
[+] [-] oillio|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bitwize|11 years ago|reply
Yeah, turns out he was just going full hipster. Which is just as bad in its own way.
Balance. In all things, balance. Not very profound to say. You can't make a manifesto out of it, because duh. But yeah. It's what works, I think.
[+] [-] nicolethenerd|11 years ago|reply
This line kind of got me, and made me think about the transience of my own work. I build educational software, and I entered this field because I was inspired by the educational games I played as a kid. Most of those games, developed for a specific operating system, can still be run today on a VM or an emulator of an older Windows machine. But the apps I work on are web applications - we're constantly racing to update and maintain them in a sea of ever-changing devices and standards. The odds of somebody being able to run my work, even a just few years from now, and have it work without issue is unfortunately kind of small (the introduction of iOS 8 already wreaked havoc on some of our layouts). And that makes me kind of sad.
[+] [-] wtetzner|11 years ago|reply
The inspiration for the idea was SCUMM, and how we're able to play SCUMM games now with SCUMMVM.
[+] [-] joeyh|11 years ago|reply
I think you'll do better if you find ways to make your clarifying restrictions be imposed upon you, rather than attaining them through willpower.
I do find 2-3 day email and internet fasts useful from time to time, but the internet is also a source of much inspiration.
[+] [-] lnanek2|11 years ago|reply
A lot of improvements to software development are too new to be time tested and encoded into book form. For example, Node scales a lot better than Rails, and maybe there are books about that now and not just everyone hearing about companies that switched, but beginner Node programmers are going to get stuck in massive ugly callback pyramids unless they learn mitigation techniques like Promises.
There's simply too many things a good coder should know that are picked up by reading other people's code. What if you didn't know about A* path finding and had a bunch of buggy, slow, piles of loops and if statements? Then you are doing shoddy work and you are charging your clients more for reinventing and debugging the wheel when you should have just looked up the algorithm.
The other problem I see is that he wants to live in the city, unlike the people he cited who moved to cheaper less busy places like Walden Pond, but he is focusing more on art than work, so it will be tougher for him to make rent. Maybe Loop/Recur is paying him enough he has time for that, though, who knows. Many people in big, expensive cities like NYC have to struggle with multiple jobs.
[+] [-] dman|11 years ago|reply
"Email is a wonderful thing for people whose role in life is to be on top of things. But not for me; my role is to be on the bottom of things. What I do takes long hours of studying and uninterruptible concentration. I try to learn certain areas of computer science exhaustively; then I try to digest that knowledge into a form that is accessible to people who don't have time for such study. "
- above excerpt from Knuth is taken from http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~uno/email.html
[+] [-] cgag|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rrggrr|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chrismartin|11 years ago|reply
The survivorship bias is a logical fallacy, not a prescription for choosing what to read!
Why disable images in your browser, when many concepts are best expressed with a diagram or photograph?
It's important to consciously limit your content consumption, but this is not the way to do it.
[+] [-] PopeOfNope|11 years ago|reply
Who says he's participating in any particular community?
> The survivorship bias is a logical fallacy, not a prescription for choosing what to read!
So you suggest reading works that didn't survive? How would you go about finding content that is by definition dead?
> Why disable images in your browser, when many concepts are best expressed with a diagram or photograph?
Yeah, you've got me there. I understand his viewpoint on this, but the execution is problematic. I'd wager the vast majority of images on websites have nothing to do with the content you're reading. Even images that are technically a part of the article you're reading frequently add nothing to the text. How do you filter the useful from the superfluous?
[+] [-] jcoffland|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 6d0debc071|11 years ago|reply
The flip-side of permanence is path-dependency. So many programs get written for a certain architecture of chip and instruction set, for instance, that to change it to something more efficient would break too many things.
To make something that lasts because it is good, that lasts on its own virtues, would be a wonderful thing. Nonetheless, the next generation ought to be able to surpass us - and if they are not able to do so, we have done something wrong. Blanket approval of past solutions simply because they have lasted seems likely to lead one wrong.
[+] [-] moultano|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Nadya|11 years ago|reply
I agree that limiting your input might help improve your output. It could also harm your output as you are having less ideas being inputted to feed inspiration.
Best of luck when you read this on Monday. ;)
[+] [-] heurist|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jonsterling|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mrweasel|11 years ago|reply
You can do broadcasting if your Linus Torvalds, if not you might need to check your email a little more frequently.
[+] [-] clay_to_n|11 years ago|reply
But when he says:
>The simple test of time does yield false negatives.
I wonder what makes him so sure it doesn't yield false positives. My own view on aesthetics is that they're highly personal - something "timeless" might not appeal to you at all. Timeless works are the ones which happen, overall, to appeal to the most people - it doesn't mean they necessarily are higher "quality." It also has to do with how accessible they are, how ubiquitous (/ marketed), etc.
(Sidenote, but his arguments against startup aesthetics could also apply to modernism and many other movements. It's about distilling something to it's essence, removing superfluous details in favor of clarity. For all the faults "flat" design has, I think it is a noble cause even if it takes some missteps.)
There is a lot of contemporary work (programming, music, art, etc) that I find compelling, and personally I want to embrace it. Understanding the contemporary helps you understand the current moment of time, and where things are going. It lets you see larger trends and where you might want to fit in. I'm not very afraid of embracing something that turns out to be a false start - at least, at the moment, I was doing what I thought was best. Maybe this is a fallacy of youth.
I'm all for embracing the classics, the tried and true. But I think applying lessons learned from them to the unproven ideas is where things get interesting.