aharrison

I believe that it is erroneous to believe that this has anything to do with software. Estimates in most or all fields are off because humans are bad at predicting timelines. This is referred to as the planning fallacy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planning_fallacy

I heartily recommend reading the studies associated with the Wikipedia page, as they demonstrate that this applies to more fields than just software. I will agree that the data does appear to support the hypothesis that the less repetitive the task, the more likely it is to fall subject to the planning fallacy.

I'm reminded of this story I heard not too long ago: http://lesswrong.com/lw/37k/rationality_quotes_december_2010...

Note that in this case of circumcision the possible negative effects are well known, but a vaccine might have complications in X years that would not be worth the decreased contraction of AIDS. In hypothetical example, perhaps it increases the chances and severity of heart attacks by some ridiculous percentage.

In general, with medicine, it sucks to be on the wrong side of an experiment, but it can be difficult to know which side that is.

Soap, ballot, jury, ammo.

Use your boxes, and please please please use them in that order.

After I read most of it, I took some problems I was having and tried to come up with mappings and methods of approach for fixing them.

Then I showed them to my mentor, and he shot them all down. But practice makes perfect, fail fast and iterate, or something.

I know this is kind of a dead horse, but it is amusing to me that the difference in verbage there is literally a factor of 8 (almost a proverbial order of magnitude). Geeks often know, but laymen very rarely do. Kind of a big thing to gloss over, regardless of which side (AT&T, Verizon, WSJ) you are on.

One thing that is important to keep in mind is that if you think there might actually, truly, be one piece of advice in this book, the cost plus time investment is trivial compared to the potential gains. None of his information is so bogus that you can throw it in the trash with other random "Be Slim in 24 hours" books.

Also, note that the placebo effect is still an effect. Fifteen bucks to cure insomnia because you believe it will be cured rather than the ice bath having scientific backing? Sign me up!

Not all information is a sure thing, sometimes it pays to start looking at the "this guy is either a genius or a madman, but it is hard to tell" section.

I have heard this before many times, and I tried to find a study that would defend that assertion one weekend and failed miserably. If you have a citation for one of those studies I would be in your debt.

Note that Mike Rowe did pretty well on that deal: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_vs._MikeRoweSoft

I don't understand your comment. You agree with yummyfajitas assertion, you appear to make a separate and mostly orthogonal assertion which borders on a refutation (I think the subtext being "the rich should help others pull themselves up") but perhaps I am misinterpreting.

I believe yfs point was progressive taxation is a bad idea because it costs the rich more but they get less out of it. I don't understand how your comment meshes with yfs. Care to elaborate?

Is anyone aware of an AI game that has a homeostatic goal? I am thinking along the lines of a SimCity style game where random negative events happen and our AI would have to account and route around these types of issues. It would be interesting to see a simulation of that nature as compared to the normal competitive game (e.g. chess, go, reversi.)

I actually had this problem when I was reading through Steve Yegge's blogs. Here was this guy who had done so much, had so many great insights, and was routinely pushing himself to do better. It was very inspiring, but also kind of scary: how can I ever be that awesome?

It took me about a year to realize that his blogs are collectively almost a decade of work by him, his collective wisdom and insight, which wasn't even started until he had been out of college for at least 5 years. I was getting a compressed version of his long-term work.

Like robryan says in another comment: the collective knowledge of HN is vast and deep indeed, but most of these people have been hacking for years or decades. Just keep at it, and try to realize that creating useful things is not a zero-sum game.

I have always envisioned Hamming's third question as less of a leading question and more of an honest one. Having read that lecture, I think if I said "well, because they don't pay and I have a mortgage" Hamming would have just as easily agreed and moved on. The interesting part to me about this series of questions is more that it requires being honest with yourself. That, and the fact that most of the people he asked were apparently insulted, took it negatively, and hated him for it. Not only could they not be honest with themselves, they metaphorically shot the messenger.

Still, a great series of questions to make you re-evaluate your course in life.

Check out this awesome site (http://www.voiceofthehive.com/). The background is painful, but the information is awesome. I don't know if it will actually help you become a beekeeper, but I enjoyed it thoroughly.

As much as I hate to plug this movie, "Cruel Intentions" had some amazing scenes where the main characters did just about every action correctly from this perspective.

Psychologists have pretty much debunked catharsis as being a good thing. [1] I think that having a environment of competitive creation is a good thing only when it causes people to excel, and only then when it is not done to excess and thus burnout or what have you. Sometimes, also, you can get some amazing things [2] when you have a negative influence which causes you to excel, but that isn't what we are seeing here, either. So sad to see so much time wasted on unproductive [3] stupidity.

[1] A weak citation is here (but I bet you could find plenty more where that came from): http://books.google.com/books?id=Pye5IkCFgRYC&pg=PA853&#...

[2] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1286253

[3] Unproductive in the sense that it isn't helping anybody. As is mentioned in the book excerpt I cited in [1], this isn't even "relaxing" people, except from exhaustion. It would be better if they were doing something which reduced their arousal.

I think we are going in circles.

I am truly in awe.

It routinely amazes me the lengths to which many people go to in their chosen domain. Some people choose physics, or medicine. Some people choose Rubiks cubes, train sets, or Sim City.

I find it hard in my day to day life to decide I will work on something for three years to truly and utterly dominate it. Especially something such as Sim City. I would say that I wish this gentleman had worked on curing cancer, or rubinius, or financial modeling, but I am beginning to think that that level of passion is non-transferable, and not something that can be taught or imbued.

Of course, this guy is an architecture major, so maybe we will see that same level of skill, dedication, and attention to detail come out in the real world.

I'm surprised there aren't more parkour practitioners here. I find it is one of the most physically demanding things a person can do, it is almost entirely free, and it requires both extreme focus and tons of creativity. Of course, the downsides are that you have to be in amazing shape (or work your way up to it) and that it does tend to result in small injuries, but I would say no more than a martial art.

Definitely a great way to get out, move around, and stay focused.

Answer: Namely, because he is a fictitious character.

The article writers contention that programmers should also have solid HCI knowledge is not necessarily unreasonable, but the comparison to "2 meetings a week, and in a year..." is just ridiculous. Perhaps it was intended to be over the top, but division of labor exists for a good reason. What we really need are amazing back-end and interface engineers who can work with eachother effectively. That, and, as we are seeing with the iPhone becoming mainstream, a cultural willingness to put in extra work on the UI because it matters.

This is drifting offtopic, but CBG was a member of MENSA[1] and therefore falls under the "quantifiably 'smart'" category.

[1] http://wiki.answers.com/Q/Is_Comic_Book_Guy_a_member_of_MENS...

This story has been the source of many discussions between my girlfriend and I, and I heartily recommend it. While it can be a bit disturbing, I think that helps drive home the point (it is kuro5hin, after all.)

It also led to a number of very amusing jokes targeted at the author (localroger). My favorite being here:

http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2008/8/20/84039/4943

This [alarm clock] will be useful to me. I sometimes forget to feed the small girl chained in my basement. Serious writers need muses.

I have tried FreeMind on several occasions and my biggest frustration point with it is that it is a tree instead of a graph. Is there an easy way to get around this? Many (most?) of my ideas interconnect and it would be nice to be able to organize them non-hierarchically.

Cialdini's Influence: Science and Practice is amazing. It is almost a perfect mix (at least, in my opinion) between rigorous (citing studies) and accessible (using anecdotes, etc).

http://www.amazon.com/Influence-Practice-Robert-B-Cialdini/d...

Unfortunately, most of the best information I have received for psychology came from the two classes I took (Social Psych, and Behavior in Organizations). I learned a tremendous amount, but very little (if anything) from the other books.

I am going to defend myself. Then, I am going blow my argument out of the water.

Backstory: I am a fifth year comp sci student. I have worked part-time as an SDE for most of my college career. The python crash I referenced earlier was in class, the java problem at work. I have written an optimizing compiler before (C subset to LLVM to SPARC MIPS), so I hope that you will at least agree that I am not a complete moron in this area.

Java story, more detail: To make a really long story short: I wanted to move a really really long stored procedure (~2k LOC) into a JDBC query. Don't ask why, it was a very scary legacy issue. So I copy and paste the stored procedure into one long const string in eclipse, and it compiles just fine. I run our ant script against it, and it explodes with a stack overflow (IIRC). The solution that I found was simply to replace newlines with \n" + (newline). No stack overflow on compilation anymore. From this I could only assume that I had fubared the compiler (which would have been a reasonable way to fubar, being as I was trying to create an absolutely massive const string directly).

Now we could quibble over whether this even counts as a crash in the sense we were talking about, but the underlying premise is: you never want to have to work around your tools. As computer scientists we do it a lot, but it is never fun and its worse when something goes down in production because the tool crapped out. Theoretically, a VM or OS should never fail and bring the entire system down. A compiler should never outright crash.

Now to debunk my own defense: I just sat down for about an hour and did everything I could to reproduce the bug in JDK 1.5.6 (the original JDK I broke it on). Well, go figure, I can't get it to break in the hypothetical way I wanted to. I might one day do exactly what I did with the stored procedure, but setting that particular environment up again would take quite some time.

In conclusion, you can assume I was an idiot because I can't show you the code. I would in your shoes. :)

P.S. This all assumes you are using tools given to you by the platform itself. Using JNI to dereference a NULL doesn't count. :D

I wish I could. I was in the middle of a lab when I did it, and as I fixed it I thought "I should really save this and figure out why it is segfaulting." Alas, the lazy part of me prevailed and I just fixed it so I could demo the assignment. Next time I run into one of those issues I am going to write about it as an example for the argument I just made.

People keep saying that, and I can understand where they are coming from, but this isn't the case. Just yesterday, I managed to segfault python 2.6.something. I have no idea why (I really should have figured it out) but my hypothesis is that I freaked out the parser. It was vanilla python code; it should never segfault. I have had the same experience with the JVM: I once segfaulted the parser by incorporating a static string that was hundreds of lines long. Curiously, Eclipse "compiled" it just fine.

Sometimes environments have bugs. If you need an underlying runtime that simply will not crash, using something tried and true may be at the top of your priority list. That might be overkill for most projects, but I can see a guy who wants something so robust he knows its his fault when it breaks.

I actually read Strunk and White as part of a computer science course this quarter, and I made many of the same connections the OP makes. Truly, a masterpiece.

I did notice, however, that most of the recommendations are extremely time-sensitive. It can be difficult in programming just as in writing to make trade-offs between time invested and benefits. In the OP's example about the Window's API, the offending code might be unimportant enough that the developer overhead of figuring out all the parameters would have been wasted effort. Maintainability has to be taken in context of importance and cost: sometimes code just doesn't need to be that clean.

Doing proper cost-benefit analysis (and getting it even remotely right) is still one of my weakest attributes, and it applies particularly heavily when utilising the advice of Strunk and White.

Also, one of my favorite quotes (paraphrasing):

"I apologize for the length of this letter, I did not have the time to make it shorter." -Blaise Pascal

I agree with you completely.

This whole weekend (including Halloween!) I have been stressing about a paper I need to write on a topic I am not remotely interested in. This reminded me that I need to both relax about the unimportant stuff and make sure that when I am done I look for the most valuable next step.

Truly, an excellent quote, and an excellent article.

Stranger in a Strange Land - Heinlein

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance - Pirsig

You have to give this guy some credit for at least trying, but the standing problem with these types of studies is that there are just too many variables. For instance, this particular study only consisted of one program. Also, it doesn't really control for program proficiency very well...he tried, but environmental impacts are going to skew those results (classes taken, work environment and language of choice, sample set bias for the previous, etc). Also, as a previous poster mentioned, these are from 2000. Since 2000, Java has made serious performance ground. I would be interested to see a few more studies like this...even if they aren't perfect, they do tend to remind people that there is a huge difference for language productivity, and that it dwarfs performance.

Maybe we could get a version where the program was to implement a decent sized project requiring several developers, to emphasise the code quality angle? That would take a lot of bored programmers to do, though.