connellybarnes

Actually sorry for my complaints. I thought about this more and realized being a professor is actually pretty good socially. I think being a grad student is just hard, unless you are very outgoing, and can get out of the lab.

I guess I just wanted to caution people that a career in computers and/or academia can very isolating unless one picks the right path. Moderation in all things.

Well maybe those physics PhDs are a lot better at socializing than me. I remember spending years of my PhD trying to make friends, going to bars/rock climbing/dances/running clubs etc to try and meet friends, but never got any where, and just feel this crushing depression every day I have to go to work and sit down at a computer for 8 hours. I feel roughly the same in a corporate or academic environment, it's the result of so much being by oneself. Perhaps I shouldn't have gone into computers?

However, Academia for the most part I think is just that sort of environment, I have commiserated with numerous PhD students who say the same thing. If one is into computers, both academia and computer engineering as career tracks are rather isolating, but some seem to like it, vs some get lonely, perhaps it's something psychological, and I'm not really intended to be such an introvert. Who knows.

I don't think academia is a bad career as long as one can get tenure at a good school, or in a good industry lab, so as to work with good people. I guess whether one can take it psychologically just depends on the individual.

Although I do agree that maybe if one had kids+wife or worked hard to be social, the 8 hours of isolation a day wouldn't be that bad. It might even be relaxing! So maybe professor is a good job for one in old age. But still I would worry about causing my students to suffer through isolation.

You can't eat prestige. Nor find joy in a life of isolation. Look at Rembrandt's philosopher if you want the true picture of the life of the mind.

How history remembers you only matters after you're dead. Can you really tell someone to live a life of solitary confinement? The isolating parts of academia honestly suck. But everyone convinces themselves that academia is so great, in part because so many have gone before, suffering, down the same path.

Look at all the theoretical physicists and mathematicians. Do you think these people are HAPPY? Remember, if you leave math you are "dead." It's about sacrifice, not about your health or happiness as a human being.

The best part of academia is the collaboration, the social aspects. As for the environment, it could definitely be renovated to make accommodation for humanity. Obviously that will never happen. So there needs to be big CAUTION signs posted up whenever someone lauds the greatness of academia, saying it is not all fun and games, lots of people spend decades locked in offices hunched over pieces of paper.

Hi this is Connelly I'm the first author on that paper. Adobe ATL's business model is that they do research and then put it in products. So Dan took the code I wrote for a summer internship (The paper you referenced. To be precise, we actually did the work in the fall before SIGGRAPH, because I only thought of the algorithm on my last week as an intern) and put it in Photoshop. So we're not ripping off anyone but ourselves :-).

By the way a shout to pg. I have mad respect for him and Jim Clark, both computer scientists/entrepreneurs who have worked really hard and selflessly to get engineers more equity over the wealth they create.

"There are, it has been said, two types of people in the world. There are those who, when presented with a glass that is exactly half full, say: this glass is half full. And then there are those who say: this glass is half empty. The world belongs, however, to those who can look at the glass and say: What's up with this glass? Excuse me? Excuse me? This is my glass? I don't think so. My glass was full! And it was a bigger glass!" - Pratchett

The "corporate ladder" analogy is broken, because the ladder is tree shaped. It's statistically impossible to climb tree shaped ladders, because they get exponentially smaller at the top, and there are too many levels. "Climb the corporate n-ary tree" would be a better analogy, for large values of n, and large tree height. It should be obvious to computer scientists, via pigeonhole arguments, why this isn't statistically feasible.

In any case, it's probably easier to find loopholes, like startups, or being an early arrival to an industry, or starting at a smaller company that inflates later, or tunneling your way between points in the corporate topology, by switching from one company to another, if you're ambitious. But betting against statistics never pays.

With a typical salary at a typical programmer job, you can make enough money in every year to take several years time off. But meanwhile, taking time off tends to cause isolation, depression, and other problems, since modern social interactions are based around work. Making enough money to retire upfront seems needlessly suboptimal, as it makes it more difficult to do things, if you choose to avoid jobs thereafter. If you choose to work at jobs afterward, then making the money upfront simply isn't necessary.

Of course in Ancient Greece it would be optimal to not have a job, but in America it's a liability.

I don't understand the get-rich-quick mentality for making startups. It's illogical. Making a startup to accomplish a meaningful goal is interesting, but money per se isn't. Making lots of money to "be free" reduces to non-meaningful goals, no-goals centered around the rejection of much of what is worthwhile in life. It's better for people to have real, tangible goals and pursue them, which nearly always leads to work, even if said people already have "enough money."

If one needs time to contemplate, sure, take a few years off. But normally during such years, people who are healthy and challenging themselves will automatically start doing things interesting enough that they can convince someone to pay them for it. If you can't do this, then you've essentially proved the irrelevance of your work (or that you need to go into academia, if your work is too theoretical to earn money in the "normal" world.)

A strong argument for making a startup is when you want to accomplish something so ambitious that no job would let you tackle that task, simply because jobs have smaller scope.

Maybe there are other good arguments for startups, but people are very unclear when they throw a bunch of confusing messages about money out there, because increasing income doesn't make people much happier [1], and it's easy for people who live in their means to take years off from jobs, if that's the issue at hand.

Even if you want to never work again, there's a greater probability of success in taking a high paying, dull job and working hard for several years, than working on a startup. But many ambitious people would have a lot less pride in doing this, despite the higher probability of success. Again this indicates that startups are really about pride of ownership, pride of tackling new ideas, changing the world, etc, than money.

[1]. http://www.princeton.edu/main/news/archive/S15/15/09S18/inde...

For much of my life, I lived in my mind, kind of autistically. I spent a lot of time figuring how to get away from people, because they wanted me to do things, and I wanted to go back to the castle in my mind. Only recently I figured out that people actually take materialism, life achievements, jobs, dress code, peer esteem, education, and so forth seriously. I had mostly figured that people were putting on a show, kind of having fun pretending to be serious about their lives. Oh the horror! -- like a bad novel -- everyone actually cares about clothes and money.

I know what you mean though about cities sending a message. I used to ignore what groups of people think, for reasons of principle, because human nature doesn't scale. But then I got the naivete cauterized out of me, and so now I pay attention to these messages, even though I don't entirely like being tuned into them. I'm not sure if I go along with the messages, maybe I'm neutral or slightly against (for reasons of principle).

In any case, I think ambition is good, because the human condition can be improved. (If it couldn't then ambition would be harmful, because it would be a zero sum game.) It's too bad the word has a connotation of money, because it would otherwise be a decent word, and I don't believe in money.

My ex-wife left me for her WoW guild leader. It's a rather addictive game, but I wouldn't exactly categorize it as social, because the 'social' atmosphere evaporates as soon as you quit the game. Social as long as you keep playing, perhaps, like drug addicts' societies, or IRC.

As for avoiding distractions, I agree with Paul that the Internet is like crack, it's really bad. Like Paul, I never watched TV. (As an aside, I think the reason most people are so dumb is because they watch a lot of TV). The Internet is like TV -- it makes one dumb, it's like crack, but it's also unavoidable when working as a programmer. I used to deal with the Internet by removing the wireless card from the laptop, and physically walking to my 'work location', which didn't have a LAN port, to get work done.

The problem with that now is that I need to use the Internet frequently to SSH into servers, download libraries, programs, and so forth, simply to get work done. I suppose I only have about 15 libraries that I use with the typical program that I'm writing. So maybe the overhead cost of me browsing the Internet and wasting time doing so is high enough that it would be better to go back to the old setup.

I'm not sure how many hackers could physically work in [law|business|medical|pharmacy|nursing].

My point was that because school systems are hackable, sometimes hackers will have hacked the signs of the costs involved. For example, my graduate school costs less than -$12,000 a year, but some peoples' schools may cost more than $12,000 a year (so they're not "doing something right?"). Big deal. In the long run, education wins financially and in terms of helping people accomplish their goals.

One can easily make the argument that startups are education, but obviously this consists of more than "Web 2.0" and a few other buzzwords thrown together at random. (I'm not criticizing Paul here, but I am criticizing the lunatic fringe that seems to grow around Paul.)

One counterexample to your theory is that if bosses limit autonomy, then large universities should limit autonomy significantly; however, they're generous in autonomy.

Now on the theory underlying your essays.

If it's barbaric to work, then one should note that it's feasible to stop working immediately, without significant wealth. It can be done piecewise: many of my friends save up and travel for a year or two, or get schools to pay for their traveling. Assuming one is investing, and not increasing spending, it will get easier rather than harder to take more and more time off from jobs over the years. Of course most people shoot themselves in the foot by taking out loans or increasing spending, but that's their problem.

If autonomy is important, then why assume startups and develop lots of minor contradictions with autonomy? Why not assume autonomy, and see where this leads?

Given your value set, which seems centered around autonomy and creating/hacking, I can't see why you promote startups as a lone solution rather than promoting a variety of solutions. For example, living cheaply, moving to cheaper nations, taking years off to travel, only reproducing when one's children need no longer work (so as to make the problem of work globally and locally decrease, rather than increase), working to bring high tech to areas without it (which might give different kinds of autonomy, as well as cheap living), working contract type jobs where taking say six months off isn't a problem, working in journalism in the areas of high tech or art (more traveling, less pay), or working in academia, where the problems with autonomy go away and hence work becomes non-pernicious.

Your work with startups is really great, but I think there are lots of other options that are equally consistent with the values of long-term autonomy and creating/hacking. I don't see that you have any particular duty to present these options, but I do think that hackers should be trying to increase the sphere of jobs known to be consistent with their values, by discussing them publicly.

My grad school pays $25 per hour. I paid nothing for undergrad. This isn't atypical.

Good point, and thanks for pointing out defaultdict(); I wasn't even aware of that class. I suppose one could use defaultdict() to gain associativity also (pass 'not found' variables through unmodified). I think I still slightly prefer replace(), for uninteresting reasons.

I agree, with two objections:

I disagree with rewriting one's program. If I rewrite a program to solve the same problem, then I'll end up having exactly the same code. This is useless. If I am solving a different problem, then rewriting is usually in order.

In regards to writing (re)readable code, I feel that the word "readable" leaves the door open to a lot of abuse, and doesn't shut the door firmly on those who encourage literate code, James Joycian code, commented code, etc! "Readable" has connotations that one can read it at leisure, like a novel. It allows for some excess, some baggage. If there were an adjective which meant "the uncompromising naked terseness of mathematics, complete absence of comments except in pathological cases (to be avoided!), and short identifiers, especially in inner scopes," then I'd use that adjective.

I usually think in terms of Occam's Razor: what minimal program description reproduces the subjective effect that a user desires? I feel that any other approach would be based on ideology. "X-Acto blade like code," perhaps, rather than "readable code?"

The string interpolation operator isn't ideal. It isn't associative, so you can't paste in a few variables, and then a few more later, and it raises an exception rather than simply putting a message such as "Missing variable: X" in the output HTML.

I fixed this by simply using string replace(), and suitably unique replace tokens.

(Then again, I program in Notepad, preferring it for aesthetic reasons over Emacs, so go figure :-)

Actually, it's probably beneficial to encourage flames. Your users are hackers, and flamewars are the only form of public dialogue among hackers. Ergo...

Corvallis has Hewlett-Packard. And a couple smaller companies. I'm not sure if it could be called vibrant...I lived there, but I'm always rather out of it.

What's great about Wellington for hackers?

People who are programmers might not have as much respect for or interest in college, because C.S. tends to be a little watered down as far as standards go. If you want high standards, go into physics or math.

Probably confirming this general prejudice, I programmed a lot in high school, and I never thought grades had anything to do with intelligence or ability or willingness to work, because all the smart people I knew had bad grades. It annoyed me when people with good grades got into good colleges for not doing interesting things, so in undergrad I decided that I'd get perfect grades. I did that, majoring in math and physics, and switched back to C.S. for grad school. My adviser told me grades don't matter in grad school, so I've now gone back to ignoring grades.

I'm in grad school at the moment. I'm sure I have a lot of learning to do, as far as what different groups of people think of all this grading information. I mostly just look at it as a proof that I'm willing to teach myself, learn, and occasionally work, so it seems frustratingly tedious to me, as I already know the answers to these questions. Since perhaps middle school, with the exception of graduate school, I've disliked much of school because I don't like being taught, as compared with being given enough freedom to teach myself (gently guided exploration is my preference).

Grad school is fun if it's your cup of tea.

Despite having extremely limited information on the subject of how grades change job prospects, I think people worry too much about grades. If you get the perfect white collar job after getting perfect grades then chances are you will still be unhappy unless it is a good fit for you. A college degree is the access card to the academic and corporate systems, so it's an important constraint, and nothing to casually dismiss or yawn at. And grades are part of that. But rational, informed decisions can be made to not go to college, or to not get good grades, depending on one's interests. For example, the corporate side of the world doesn't interest me at all, and I have the nagging feeling that in undergrad I really should've been exploring what I wanted to do with my life more instead of spending four years trying to get good grades.

The bottom line is that I'm not convinced that careers and that ordering them the way that everyone tells me to will necessarily give me happiness. When in doubt, ignore everyone else and listen to oneself, but first maximize your information by reading lots of good books on the subject of grades and careers, and also be rational and don't overly discount the worth of your future time; realize that grades are a part of the union card for corporate America and the academic world.

Visual Basic was great. Maybe barely usable as a language alone, but great because it allowed you to do lots GUI-wise with little code.

As far as great hackers having an effect on much of anything, as long as most corporations continue to ignore disparities in skill among programmers and pay them all equally, the more skilled craftpeople naturally will be driven away from the average corporation, into areas like research, stock trading, startups, or the safe umbrella of Google, where they are either compensated in money or in being not treated like kids. This is perfectly natural (indeed, I'm surprised that many skilled white collar workers in other professions are willing to work at the average corporation). But in the meantime, the skilled craftspeople have little effect on the mainstream development of computer programming, which is done by the large corporations. Thus "skilled hackers" are neither here nor there in the development of things of late, and this shouldn't be surprising.

Or see http://www.google.com/intl/en/options/ . The point is, if you're not talking about games, Microsoft is basically irrelevant to the way that the majority of people use computers.

Wow, OK many of these comments are kind of like disrespectful to Paul Graham because they kind of indicate that many people have learned absolutely nothing from him. Wow. That's really depressing.

Microsoft will linger on as long as games are based on DX. They might be able to do some additional damage with their browser monopoly. But I agree: fresh air is blowing in the door, and programmers are getting a feeling that it at last is spring-time.