How I Hacked My Husband's Programming Addiction | Hacker News Reader

How I Hacked My Husband's Programming Addiction

huffingtonpost.ca

38 pointsmck-52 comments

>>"Damn it! I'm a human, not a boolean condition!" I'd declare, clearly emotionally compromised.

This will probably be an unpopular comment on HN, but I think there are a lot of vulcans[1] in the tech scene that would be more socially amiable & better understand others if they stopped trying to exclusively use cold-logic on people and understood that emotions are just as important as logic when dealing with humans.

"All cruel people describe themselves as paragons of frankness." - Tennessee Williams

"Honesty without Compassion is Cruelty" https://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20140121033617-3...

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vulcan_(Star_Trek)

I've always held that it was deeply illogical of Spock not to factor his emotions and his brain's built-in reward mechanisms into the equation.

You could argue that Spock was "logical" in that his reasoning was self-consistent. He was, however, irrational.

that's a pretty weak meaning of "logical" though. you can always get internal self-consistency by ignoring parts of a system until what's left is a coherent subset, but that seems like a pretty meaningless operation.

.... and yet, most people are not self-consistent, so apparently this is not a meaningless operation.

The Vulcan discipline of general emotional suppression and logic is, in setting, very much about maximizing utility in the long-term by understanding and mastering impulses that lead to trading long-term maximization for short-term reward; the quasi-religious devotion to logic that is typical of Vulcans is set up deliberately as being an overreaction in that direction, however, and achieving a synthesis which embraces emotion while mastering it is a big part of the long arc of the Spock story.

If your goal is to manipulate people into doing what you want, then yes, you should consider their emotional state above rational argument.

If your goal is to pursue the truth and make correct decisions, you must not pay any heed whatsoever to the emotions of the person(s) you're trying to reach a decision with. That is, you can try to be delicate, but you mustn't allow their emotions to prevent the argument from being rational.

If your goal is to reach the best outcome, current and future emotions are an important input into your hopefully rational process.

If your goal is to pursue the truth and make correct decisions, you must not pay any heed whatsoever to the emotions

This presupposes that the emotions cannot be a source of true information.

> That is, you can try to be delicate, but you mustn't allow their emotions to prevent the argument from being rational.

Trying to be delicate is paying heed to their emotions, and this kind of "manipulation" is an important part of communication. You are manipulating them to follow the same thought process as you, so that they can understand your (supposedly) rational conclusion, and if they respect you they will be happily allow themselves to be manipulated in this way.

Completely ignoring their emotions is an excellent way to convince an otherwise rational person to ignore your argument. People are not rational, and being right is not sufficient to be persuasive.

I missed the part where she hacked her husband's addiction ... what I heard is that she went from being an enabler to a co-junkie.

On the other hand, my wife has said some of the same things about me. She doesn't complain when I bring home a paycheck though, and she really does help me stay "balanced enough".

"Hack" is a slang term that has many different meanings depending on the context. Here it's a play on two different meanings: computer programming, and coping with a situation. http://www.usingenglish.com/reference/idioms/can't+hack+it.h...

And it has at least two more meanings.

And the article doesn't really match either of those reasons!

Sure it does. She had a problem (not being able to share her husband's interests), and instead of the obvious solution (pull him away from his interests) she found a novel and better one (join him in his interests). It's a perfect hack.

so she "hacked" their relationship, not his addiction

Yes.

She didn't hack their relationship at all, that's my point. She learnt about hacking and that's the closest the article got to the title.

yeah, I agree with you- I wouldn't use the term 'hack' at all. Just that if we had to use the term, the least bastardized way of doing it would be to say that it was the relationship being modified, not his addiction. She literally did nothing about his addiction. I suppose you could say she "hacked" (again, disgusting choice of words) her PERCEPTION of his addiction...

either way, it's a poor choice of words

His addiction was a problem. Now it's less of a problem. She just approached the problem from her end instead of his.

It's rational and normal for editors to employ article titles which are aimed more at driving traffic than accurately describing the article content. "Hack" is an overused word that the journalists thought would sell their article.

And alas, it's working, and we are all enablers. ;_;

I'm glad the author was open minded enough to try it herself and stop judging. The other women she mentions sound like monsters who are unsupportive of their husbands. If they were writing a book, I doubt anyone would make a big deal of it, let alone write an article about it. I'd expect the wives to be supportive or leave. Programming might be addictive, but it is productive. It's a far cry from drinking or using drugs. Instead of trying to stop their spouses, perhaps programmers' significant others should learn to embrace their spouses' work just as one might try to embrace and support a writer they were married to.

To compare programming to drug addiction is unfair to both programmers and addicts.

> If they were writing a book, I doubt anyone would make a big deal of it, let alone write an article about it.

I doubt that. Complaints -- including articles, and whole books -- about spouses being obsessed with their work or hobby rather to the point of neglecting a spouse have been common for a lot longer than computer programming. And writing and other arts have been very well represented as subjects of those complaints, far more than computer programming.

That's... Not really what an addiction is. And someone hiding my computer from me because they've decided they don't like me programming? Well, that's just odd...

All in all though, a decent motivational story -- although I wonder whether it's a good thing for everyone to know enough programming to be dangerous: I certainly wrecked our home computer a number of times while learning as a kid ;)

"I often see the effects of coding manifest in his daily habits and tasks: the way he meticulously organizes his sock drawer and how he does the dishes using the least amount of water and soap yet somehow achieves the highest level of cleanliness."

"I commiserated with other women -- girlfriends and wives of computer programmers who told me how their partners often forgot to eat, drink or go to the bathroom."

I'm sorry lady, you're not married to a programmer, you're married to a robot.

"The task was to build a website in six hours. We were guided through the basic concepts of HTML and CSS during two morning lectures led by teachers from Vancouver's Lighthouse Labs, then we were let loose to start creating our own projects."

"Organizers told me 60 per cent of the participants at the HTML500 were women. Everyone had different reasons for choosing to spend their Saturday learning computer science:"

Ah yes, the well-known computer science fields of HTML and CSS. Those aren't even programming languages!

> Ah yes, the well-known computer science fields of HTML and CSS. Those aren't even programming languages!

If a kid gave you a crayon picture, would you throw it in her face for having a shaky hand and a poor grasp of anatomy?

Everyone has to start somewhere. For a complete newbie, HTML works as well as anything for teaching the basic idea of language grammar, and better than most for giving immediate positive feedback.

"If a kid gave you a crayon picture, would you throw it in her face for having a shaky hand and a poor grasp of anatomy?"

This analogy is awful, although I admit I was being a bit pedantic: my point was that learning to use markup languages isn't "learning computer science," although it does qualify as learning software development.

I also thought the idea of "spending a Saturday learning computer science" to be kind of funny. It's like if you spent a day making popsicle stick catapults and described it as "spending a Saturday learning physics."

I'm the king of the pedants over here, but mocking a newbie for making an honest effort at trying something new and not quite having the terminology down after her very first day is kinda lame. Yeah, her language is humorously awkward, but she's getting out there and trying. We need to encourage this, both as programmers and as scientists.

Or maybe we should discourage it instead, for job security purposes.

Yeah you're right, I just chortled when I read that bit.

Well, to use Randall's words, isn't HTML using words and symbols to describe the way some points of light show up? Heck, CSS can even make those points of light change over time nowadays. So, why is HTML/CSS not 'computer science'. Is programming in C 'computer science'? (I'd argue that only the smallest part of our field is really 'CS', the rest is closer to engineering).

Fair enough, the distinction between CS and Software Engineering can certainly be blurry at times.

HTML is definitely a declarative programming language. Its a limited (i.e., not Turing complete) language, which makes it of limited value as a vehicle for most general computer science concepts, but its still a programming language.

Interesting. I googled around after reading this and found that apparently there's debate around whether this is true: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/145176/is-html-considered...

This looks like spam for learning to code dressed up as some kind of supposedly true anecdote. One of these husbands is believable, but an entire cluster?

Okay now, please be nice, she is really trying :) Sounds like PhasmaFelis is the only one on this thread who got the point.

I think most of you here really enjoy what you do for a living. I can't be certain, but I'd venture to guess that the tech industry scores the highest when it comes to the happiness factor.

As for me personally -- having come from investment banking and consulting -- it was the best choice I made for my career and personal sanity. It was clear to my wife how much happier I had become -- not working for some faceless corporation and actually contributing tangible value to society.

Journalism is a noble, but unfortunately, a declining field. It is stagnant. There isn't much funding [1]. I have been urging her to get involved with the vibrant tech community, which she has been. When I told her that I was volunteering at the HTML 500, she jumped at the opportunity -- and blogged about it :) yes yes.. HTML is not real programming (even though it is probably the single technology that touches most people's lives) and yes, Lisp does not have semicolons, but Javascript does, so there.

By the sounds of it, she seems to have finally garnered the curiosity and drive to dive deeper in the rabbit hole. At least to give it a try, it might not be for her, but she will understand me better. This kind of behaviour should be condoned.

It is also her first time on Hacker News, so we should show her how great a community this is (and that we are not a bunch of pedants)!

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5324429

Edit: Now why did this post get penalized and bumped all the way to the third page, where it was sitting in the Top 10 just 30 min ago?

Kind of off topic, but people have been talking about "programming" their remote control for a very long time. And what does it involve to "program" your remote control? Simply going to the menu on your TV, and setting up some of the buttons to carry out specific tasks.

Likewise, I really don't see how HTML _isn't_ programming. If anything, HTML is a language that _programs_ the browser. It tells it _how_ to generate the DOM tree. It's a declarative language. And lately, I've been seeing a rise in declarative style. Look no further than Express.js, and its routes. You can pass more than one callback functions per route, allowing you to specify _what_ a route does in a more declarative manner.

So to everyone that have been saying that your wife isn't really programming, I highly suggest that they re-evaluate what programming is. If they are still convinced that HTML isn't programming, then at least they can be sympathetic with her efforts to be more involved with what you are so passionate about.

Computer engineers go by a number of different stage names: they are software developers, programmers, coders, hackers.

Computer engineering is an umbrella term, although it's usually implied that they have an above-average understanding of hardware. It's not a synonym for programmer.

Marc's mind was a symphony of brackets, tags, semi-colons and logic operators. To me, it was just noise.

Yet at the end she mentioned him specifically writing in Ruby (Rails) and Common Lisp.

Otherwise, it was a decent sentimental story. I'm not particularly a fan of emotionally manipulative glurge and I can't help but smirk at the whole "learn to code = write markup" equivocation and the general try-hard tone, but it was okay. I can see it being motivating.

If he's using CL and RoR, he's probably using a bunch of other stuff too. Anyway, writing markup has a similar write-test-debug cadence to writing code.

> Computer engineering is an umbrella term, although it's usually implied that they have an above-average understanding of hardware. It's not a synonym for programmer.

I've given up on explaining that to most people. My degrees are CS and Math. I work in a software shop. There is hardware work being done, but mostly of the "did we hook up the right cables?" sort of work. However, whenever I start explaining that it's not engineering in the sense that they mean (which really is the computer/electrical engineer sense) they start thinking I'm in IT.

I gave a shot at it here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6956528

I'm not really sure what "tags" refers to, but I'm pretty sure you can write fairly acceptable Ruby and Lisp without brackets, semicolons, or logic operators. That's not to say you can't use them; just that you don't actually have to.

So what I'm hearing is that she's actually talking about C.

"When we disagree on something, for example, he always presents the most goddamned rational arguments laying them out in an obnoxiously coherent and systematic way."

If politicians did this, the world would be a much better place.

> If politicians did this, the world would be a much better place.

If politicians did that, they wouldn't be elected. The last approximation of an intellectual to run for high office was Adlai Stevenson in the 1950s. The voters didn't trust him -- he seemed to be too smart.

This is why I decided against becoming a politician. No one would vote for me (like how I managed to hand myself a compliment there?)

The last approximation of an intellectual to run for high office was Adlai Stevenson in the 1950s.

In Canada, we had Michael Ignatieff -- former Harvard professor and holder of 11 honourary degrees -- as a "candidate for prime minister" in 2011. (We don't elect our Prime Ministers directly, but the leader of the winning party inevitably becomes Prime Minister, and polling has found that a lot of voting is determined by whom voters would like to see become Prime Minister.)

Ignatieff led the Liberal party to a disastrous defeat, in large part because whenever he was asked about an issue, he would respond by explaining in detail the merits of two or three different positions -- and never quite say which position he himself held.

It wasn't that he was too smart or that voters found him to be untrustworthy; voters simply couldn't figure out what policies he believed in.

I think there's a certain huckster and salesman instinct in successful politicians, a base sense of how to appeal to common values that becomes second nature, no rehearsal required. Lyndon Johnson had it in excess.

When they do, people deride them as patronizing.

Loathsome pop-psych, loathsome relationship pattern ... and redeemed by turning it on its head. Well played. Had me hate-reading in the middle and happy by the end.

'How I stopped my husband making money so he could give me more attention, in-turn creating the perfect future argument that we don't make enough money'

Programmers know nothing of logic. This article is a fabricated advert like most of HuffPo's content.

A true programming addict would even bother with the dishes.

Now Yahoo pay attention! if you could only insult the average persons intelligence while selling ads that look like content! (oh wait)

And while were broadsiding barns with the word "addict", lets take a moment to reflect what addiction really is!. Phil Hoffman RIP.

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