You weren't born to just write code and die | Hacker News Reader

You weren't born to just write code and die

adambourg.com

49 pointssnow_mac47 comments

But I like writing code, a lot. I like biking and trains and taking pictures and fashion and working out, but why does it always feel like those are given more social credence as a use of time?

TBH I'd really like to write a lot of code and then die, that seems so much more satisfying than a ton of other jobs I've done...

I removed all links to Amazon and others, except for the photo credits. I am not an Amazon Associate, I was just trying to link to be helpful.

Yeah, people were confused by links like this one:

http://www.amazon.com/Dropping-Acid-Reflux-Diet-Cookbook/dp/...

Which has some traces of how you navigated through amazon to get to the page (the ref= and such). That's according to reddit anyway: https://www.reddit.com/r/amazon/comments/qim88/referral_code... . An associate referral would apparently be tag=.

I guess if you want to put the links back in, links like:

http://www.amazon.com/Dropping-Acid-Reflux-Diet-Cookbook/dp/...

will incite less whinging.

There are an awful lot of referrer links in this article. That's not a bad thing by itself, but it always makes me ask the question - Did this person write the article they wanted to write and then add referrer links, or did they decide to put in a load of referrer links and then build an article around it?

I put links in my article without referrals. I make no money from it. Just linking to things I think are useful

Perhaps in several thousand years when humanity has been overtaken by bio-augmentations and genetic engineering, when consciousness can be uploaded and modified. "We" will look back at human beings as only the precursor to life. In this sense, you most certainly were born to write code and die.

Those tips seem to be to enable to code more and die a little later. The key to getting more satisfaction from coding is to work on projects with clear value to people.

Life advice that involves buying a msft ergo keyboard.

I have not read the article yet but that sounds like good advice to me

Honestly, "Buy yourself a good keyboard, this is mine" is damned good advice.

I thought so. I have spent way more on my coffee budget in the last 2 weeks then on the gear I spend 8-10 hours a day using to make my living. That's a little crazy, don't you think? I say buy good gear that makes your life better.

Supposedly respected names like Jeff Atwood and Scott Hanselman say the same thing (not the brand necessarily, but the idea that you should buy a good keyboard ... I say this as I type on a $170 Das Keyboard ....)

Atwood cares so much about this that he even has his own keyboard: codekeyboards.com (edit: corrected domain) (which I have at office)

I think codekeyboards.com will work better

thanks.. was typing from memory. An upvote for you :-)

Find what you love and let it kill you. Sure you weren't born to just write code and die, but you weren't really born for any purpose, so you have to decide what it is yourself. And then you'll die. And what came before will have to have been enough.

To some people this idea is fundamentally liberating, personally I find it tragic. But my point is that it's a sad situation no matter what. You can exercise if you want, you can buy cool gear. it's coming nevertheless.

Did anyone notice that the "previous" link at the end of the article was to an entry named "Live and die by the keyboard: How to be more productive!"?

Good article -- though I feel like it might be common sense to most adults... Do stuff you like while balancing the rest of your life and responsibilities.

Lol, thats a great point.

It's a sad reflection of our times that an article with this title even needs to be written.

I disapprove of that sentiment for I could publish an article titled "You are not supposed to stick metal objects in electrical plugs". Point being, titles seldom matter.

Agreed. It's a pity that posts like this are any more interesting or notable than a posts explaining why it's important to maintain basic hygiene and eat well. This should be something that'd only be news to e.g. second graders. Ideally a (minimum) half-semester survey of the problem(s) of and major thoughts on "the good life" would find its way into most people's formal education.

Site has been hackernewsed, cache: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...

"Error establishing a database connection".. i dont know why, but seeing this in 2016 still cracks me up.

Why is it so hard to build blog engines that simply write articles to disk/cache and just use the db for content management?

I forgot to setup caching

I think a good measure of one's success is how much time one has where one can do anything one wants.

Sure... i just want the opportunity to write good code, once, before i die and getting paid for it :)

Tea is hard on your kidneys, hope you don't get stones :-)

no. i make myself write code until i die... :)

And there are people with a bit of mental illness, like myself, who have to code all the time. I do exercise on a treadmill, but I have a keyboard/monitor on the treadmill so I can keep working.

good thing I checked the comments out first.

What a bunch of asshats you guys are being, they were never referral links, he was including them to be useful... you guys that were complaining are quite honestly horrible people for doing so...

seriously. talk about herd mentality.

Good ideas, too bad about the Andrew Weil connection http://www.quackwatch.org/11Ind/weil.html https://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/tag/Andrew-Weil/

etc etc

It's definitely one of the densest Amazon Associates linkfarms I've seen in a while.

EDIT: I stand corrected. It had high link density to Amazon, but did not have associates tags.

I am not an associate. I put links in my article without referrals. I make no money from it. Just linking to things I think are useful

Ha, yeah. Lots and lots of Amazon products, with referral codes.

Garbage self promotion submitted by the author himself.

Thats actually false.

There's nothing wrong with authors submitting their own articles to HN. On the contrary, authors honor HN by sharing their work here and engaging with the community about it.

As for the Amazon links, if it's actually true that they were just links, not referrals, then you owe him an apology for more than just being rude.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11014139 and marked it off-topic.

I find it to be garbage self promotion when an article with little and/or poor content is submitted by the author and immediately gets 10+ upvotes without any comments, sending it straight to the front page.

In this case, straight to the front page despite many negative comments about the content.

If the article is not an Amazon link farm, it sure as hell reads exactly like one. So much so that my assumption is that the author intended to add in referral codes at a later date when reaching peak audience.

As author has since removed links, this should address your concern. Being wary of Amazon links is probably smart, but referring to something as "garbage" just makes you a jerk.

No no. My main concern is authors gaming HN to promote terrible content.

I've looked at the data and there is zero evidence that the author gamed HN.

You need to stop slinging accusations at people. Gaming HN is bad. We greatly appreciate your and other users' concern about that, and believe me we share it. But undermining civility on HN is also bad, and that's the bad thing that actually is happening here. Please don't do it anymore, regardless of how weak you think an article is.

I only submitted this as a link to Hacker News, Echo JS and Reddit. Not gaming any system, just sharing what I wrote. Isn't that the point of a blog?

Yes, and it's ok. (I'm a moderator here, btw, so it really is ok.)

The 'gaming' in question was about getting people to upvote one's stuff. That's against the rules, but we saw no evidence you did it. This is why I chided the user who made that accusation. It's corrosive of the civility we strive for here when people make accusations without real grounds for them.

I have a great idea, since my content is so terrible, lets see what content you can produce and see what the feedback is on it. I bet there will be plenty of people who will say your content is 'terrible'.

The amazon links did not have 'tag=' which is what the referral program uses. They just had 'ref=' which is what amazon uses to track how you got around the site.

Regardless, the author has since removed the links.

Well, that was a big waste of time. I'm glad I only skimmed it instead of reading it. It also had too many links.

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