"There is nothing wrong with that actually."
27 karma · joined May 18, 2012
Can you recommend any primary sources to learn more about this history (besides the patents themelves)? It sounds like you have read some?
On the bright side, not everyone took the Edison approach. Are you familiar with the history of Hans Bessemer and his approach to patents?
This article was too short. I was hoping for a more "NewYorker-length" piece.
Thanks again for redirecting our attention toward some quality stuff.
I'm psyched to get some version of Plan9 running on a netbook. Plan9 is work of art.
They like writing 200 pages of documentation. And some like reading it. They want complexity. Keep adding stuff.
I remember reading one of the Windows programmers' hero's writing about some massive document of several hundred pages he wrote while on the Excel team at Microsoft and being overjoyed when he learned Bill Gates had actually looked at it.
I remember reading a post by some programmer on Sitepoint boasting about his program that was so complex it would make your eyes burn, or something like that. He was bragging about this.
I recall all the people in mailing lists and forums who get annoyed when anyone talks about conserving memory or disk space. The reason? Because these resources are so plentiful we can afford to waste them. That is a truly great reason. Brilliant.
I once had a colleague who said software is like a gas. It expands to fill space.
There are a great majority of prorammers who are not only OK with this state of affairs but they seek to preserve it. They get defensive when confronted with spending effort to simplify something.
There's a lot of discussion of simplicity that is just lip service. The truth is, simplicity is not easy. It is not a matter of adding more stuff. And we know programmers are lazy. Simplicity, real simplicity - removing stuff, would make many programmers uncomfortable. It would remove them from their comfort zone.
Simplicity is not burying things under five layers of abstraction so that it fits someone's preferred way to model a solution.
Simplicity is taking away things that are not essential until nothing further can be taken out.
It is cutting things down to size.
Achieveing simplicity means reducing someone's 200 pages documentation or their dizzyingly complex program whose source "will make your eyes burn". It may include using compact symbols instead of someridiculouslylongfunctionname. It means some stuff that someone spent time producing must get cut out.
The creators of complexity are not going to be happy with this. Because they like complexity. They like verbosity. It's comforting. They detest what appears to be cryptic.
That is the price of simplicity. To achieve it in today's programming environment involves offending some people. As such, we avoid it. We discuss it, but we really just dance around it much of the time. Let the complexity continue. We can pretend more abstraction equals more simplicity. Be happy, be productive and have fun.
Meanwhile the connoiseurs of simplicity are marginalised, often leaving them to write occasional blog posts like this one and to work on their simple projects in relative isolation. Embedded programmers know the feeling. Those who appreciate simplicity, and really do trim things down to size, are not the majority.
Keep posting those articles on Forth, hoping someday people might catch on.
I've also been an Atlast user for a few years. Can't believe I never heard about your fork of it. John Walker's writeup on Atlast should be required reading for all programmers.
I'm going to try 9atom. I have a newer Eee with no CD drive. With BSD I can convert iso to img, add boot code and be up and running quick. But I guess it won't be so simple with 9atom? If this works, I'll be very happy.
Your blog says you have an EeePC and run Plan 9. So does Plan 9 run on the Eee? If yes, which Eee model do you have? As for the article, it's been a while since I looked at Inferno. Thanks for redirecting attention to it again. It seems like it would make a great mobile OS.
I am going to try running Inferno on an EeePC. Will it only run on Linux? How about BSD?
Maybe some people don't find sitting in meetings all day to be all that satisifying. But they are stuck in it due to family expenses. Maybe they would prefer something more stimulating, if they could have the chance.
The default state of the startup should be: _fun_.
More fun than you would have by being required to show up and remain for eight or more hours each day at a corporate campus where you can clearly see people are not getting much done, but are relying on their position as a source of corporate-sponsored welfare.
To work on a startup should be a privilege for anyone who has worked in a corporate setting for any length of time.
Riding on the success of a large corporation is easy. In many cases all you need to do is show up. But that doesn't always mean you were "a success" or a part of the reason for the company's success. You may have come along after they had already succeeded, looking for an easy payout. Some people make a career out of this. They never join early stage companies. Again, there are family expenses and these motivate people's decisions.
Working on a startup is a way to be able to take full credit for whatever happens. It might be credit for failure. It might be for success. But at least you know you were responsible, and not riding on someone else's coattails.
For all we know several of these search engines are all accessing the same cache and they are simply choosing to focus on different options that the cache license offers and making different arbitrary CGI decisions like slash bang whatever.
It makes sense to hide details behind "magic" if the users are unsophisticated. But it seems like there's really little reason to do this for sophisticated searchers.
Maybe there is and I am just not seeing the competitive advantage or value addition.
At the same time, I feel like we may have different search engines all using the same licensed cache source and trying to differentiate themselves on multiple implementations of idiosyncratic ways to access the same cache API, instead of focusing on more basic factors, like speed and privacy.
Maybe searchers just want to access that licensed cache which is too expensive for them to subscribe to. Maybe it's not so important all the fancy things one can do with CGI. Maybe the fancy things are important. Maybe they just crave "features". I don't know.
But my guess is the BOSS cache is probably not that hard to work with and that most searchers could get their searches done easily enough, in simple fashion, if they had their own BOSS subscriptions, without the need for lots of customisations (which equate to the exotic features of these search engines).
Just my thoughts.
Are you attributing the "boon" to one web developer when it really is a result of the inevitable growth of the web, mobile computing, internet connectivity, dropping costs for hardware, etc.? Or maybe it's the amazing feat of acquiring a billion users? Maybe you think that was heretofor impossible?
If it wasn't the Facebook site, it would have been another site. Do you disagree? To think that Facebook made something possible that would not have been possible without one web developer seems irrational. It could have been anyone.
People can connect. Not because of one person and his website, but because of technology.
If a billion people choose to sign up and use your website as a hub for personal communication, I think that places some responsibility on you.
Whether you become a billionaire or not should not affect that responsibility.
HN itself is a sort of social honeypot. But just look at what FB does with the information they collect.
They simply have no sense of restraint. And it all starts with Zuckerberg and his attitude.
But what the "HN mob" is evaluating is what Facebook is actually doing, not each and every employee of the company as a person.
Ultimately, it's more important what Facebook's users think of the company, and what hackers who understand the technology that Facebook uses think of what they are doing, not what Facebook's business partners think of Facebook's employees and management.
(This is my opinion not fact.)