Lack of wealth through lack of empathy — Can you produce what you can’t consume? | Hacker News Reader

Lack of wealth through lack of empathy — Can you produce what you can’t consume?

yosefk.com

35 pointsblasdel12 comments

The punchy guy is an asshole. I've encountered the type many times; most often they have a burning compulsion to show me outrageous porn videos as some sort of weirdo masculinity test. There's not much you can do other than roll your eyes. And watch your back...I personally think this kind of behaviour is a sign of incipient sociopathy. If he screws up and is at risk of losing his job he'll cheerfully say you put him up to it.

Happily these types are a minority. Get a newer phone and before long you'll think of something fun and useful to do with it. Don't let episodes like this send you into a depression - I understand your frustration but people who are amused by meanness or fart jokes usually have sad shrivelled inner lives.

Of course, you could ask to try it out using him as a subject. Then keep 'punching' him way longer than appropriate. After which he's likely to avoid you for a while.

I know it's peripheral to the article but that punching app sounds creepy as hell.

I'm surprised that it apparently fits Apple's vision more than women in bikinis do.

> I'm surprised that it apparently fits people who complain to Apple's vision more than women in bikinis do.

FTFY.

Seriously, this is just another manifestation of how USA mores are more permissive towards violence than sexuality. Apple's an American corporation under US laws and community standards; what did you expect?

The Discovery Channel non-judgmental anthropologist version is that it allows one to express negative emotions (or joking about untrue negative emotions) about a subject without actually causing them physical harm, in a form factor which invites sharing the negative emotions socially. Since most people in fact have negative emotions about someone at some point in time, this sharing provides cathartic release, and since there is widespread feeling for this need, the meme spreads quickly.

It isn't exactly appealing to the best side of human nature, but the user psychology is interesting -- particularly the social angle.

Hatred/frustration isn't the only emotion out there, just like things that jiggle are not the only things that catch the imagination of twenty-somethings. I wonder what could happen if you replicated the fundamentally social experience with something a little more positive. Maybe e.g. something which let young ladies show their friends how awesome their friends were. Or, and this would be at the top of the Japanese charts in a minute, an application where you take a picture of a friend and it does the appropriate transformations to look like an omiai photo (traditionally prior to an arranged marriage dossiers are passed between the prospective couple, including a photo done in a particular style -- let your imagination run wild on the social possibilities for having one of these made for anyone you can point the camera at).

"an inexplicably moronic hit app"

Tip: Empathy is easier if you don't describe the people you're trying to empathize with using negative-affect terms.

I think that's him 'showing' instead of 'telling'; consciously or not.

As someone who builds tools for developers, my interest was initially to make it easier for me to build apps myself. I didn't quite know what I wanted to build, but I knew I wanted to build it fast, so I built a company around web development tools.

Then came the task of proving that it was capable. That it actually could build apps, so I had to build some apps on it myself. How? Which? Why?

Well, so to do that, I have to become someone else. I have to become someone else who needs software. Ironically, software developers have the least use for software of anyone. Our life, as the OP states, is filled with developing. So stop being a developer.

Since then, I've taken up gardening. There are tens of thousands of plants. Searching through them to find the right one for you is almost impossible. It's like finding stocks... there's another app!

So get a hobby find something you like outside developing and get into the mind of someone whose life is as filled with that hobby as your life is filled with developing. Yes, that means you'll have to stop developing a bit, not really though. You'll mostly just be developing something for your other self. The other self with the hobby outside developing -- plants or stocks or camping.

It doesn't really matter. For every topic there is, there's probably an improvement to the process.

Imagine if I, someone who needs a plant app, and someone with algorithmic identification algorithms got together and built a plant identification system that would work on uploaded photos. I'd love that. I'd love to know what kind of plants are in my yard and I guarantee others would like it too.

So... if you find you have some empathy for something that is non-standard for a developer (and even non-standard for the mainstream), you should cultivate it.

I think it's very difficult to build something that you yourself don't want to use - and this is IMHO a great reason for being "well rounded". The more demographics and groups you can identify with and understand, the more versatility you have as an entrepreneur.

For one thing, your "cred" with that demographic would be real, and you won't have to hire half-assed "insiders" who may or may not know better than you.

I can relate to some degree, certainly some of the big hits on the iPhone seem completely useless to me. But not all of them - just find something useful and implement that. Not everybody has to write fart apps.

On the other hand, as I recently started Android programming, of course the idea of a fart app occurred to me. But to make it "cool" (if it ever could be), I was thinking it should become some kind of fart synthesizer, with lots of knows to twist to find the right fart sound. Not sure if the iPhone apps already do that, they just might. Off the top of the head, I wouldn't even know how to code it, would first have to read about wave table synthesis, Fourier analysis or whatever would work best. So at least I would learn something along the way.

Meanwhile somebody else will probably become rich by just playing back a recording of his own bowel movements...

Anyway, luckily I have lots of other ideas, so I don't think I'll tackle the farting problem soon. Maybe better to not have that on one's CV.

Edit: just checked in the marketplace, and some of the fart apps have creative ideas. One has timers for time bombs, and can even be triggered by SMS.

I've been struggling with this issue of empathy myself. I'm constantly bugged about being very capable of building things for an employer, but having no idea how to make something people want.

How does one cultivate this empathy?

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