1,562 karma · joined December 7, 2010
Similar to the end of our galaxy, in which all that we've worked for will literally be sucked into a black hole? And if we escape that, eventually our species will fade away like dust in the wind. I see an over-focus on the tangible same as I see an over-focus on the abstract -- they are both extremes that do actually end up nowhere. If one devotes his/her life to the tangible, but never questions the unknown, did they live? Did they ask themselves "What is love" and awe in its mystery when they found it? Or did they break down love into a series of chemical reactions?
No I would not say pondering the unknown or the unanswerable is empty and meaningless. It often provides the fodder for life's later actions. I do agree though that an overemphasis on it ("head in clouds") fits your epistomatic masturbation analogy.
The self-image comes into play when you're trying to act in a certain accordance with what's in your head. If you think you're bound for great things, you'll look for great things to tackle and you won't be satisfied until you're at whatever version of success you have in your head. If your self-image is happy & settled-down, you'll similarly stress over this. Eventually though, you'll probably get what you wanted because the law of attraction is quite real.
When you talk about accomplishment, it's a relative term though I understand you mean money in this case. Self-image is self-directed, and typically comes from a desire, which naturally comes from a lack. You will see many buy into the trap that money = happiness, and they will thus imagine themselves as some rich, successful tech CEO. After that, self-image has to match up with real-world, so work. The ones who truly believe they are will eventually succeed, and the ones with little willpower will fail. This goes for every facet of life.
That's why it's good to ponder "who am I?" because it's actually a step after "what do I want?" If you can see it, you can be it. Some will call it megalomania and others will call it dedication. Without knowing the person intimately, it's hard to understand which it is, but I'm an optimist and lean on the side of most successful people got there through a lot of hard work -- where their self-image was tested again & again.
The truth is nobody can tell you that you are or aren't successful. Ultimately, it's a personal decision and comes down to if your ideal version of yourself is staring back at you in the mirror.
They open up pandora's box and allow game devs to focus on superficialities to increase revenue (such as a bonus level, ways to skip level, etc..). Were the playing field completely even -- no in-app purchases -- gameplay would necessarily have to win out and people might spend more time reading mobile game reviews.
When you can be angry bird and get on the top grossing list for a long, long time because you got in-app purchases, I believe it skews the data and as a result, many are poorly informed as to which game truly is the best.
I guess, but what project doesn't end up using a library that does indeed use inheritance or composition? You can say oh black box, I don't need to care, but inheriting from a library's base class is programming in the real world 101. It's just kinda silly really if you're a working programmer and don't understand the difference. It takes like 1-15m of googling and reading to be like "oh ok, ya I see now."
Furthermore, how can you plan effectively if you can't even see these things? From Joel on Software "Painless Functional Specification - Part 1: Why bother?":
> Why won't people write specs? People claim that it's because they're saving time by skipping the spec-writing phase. They act as if spec-writing was a luxury reserved for NASA space shuttle engineers, or people who work for giant, established insurance companies. Balderdash. First of all, failing to write a spec is the single biggest unnecessary risk you take in a software project. It's as stupid as setting off to cross the Mojave desert with just the clothes on your back, hoping to "wing it." Programmers and software engineers who dive into code without writing a spec tend to think they're cool gunslingers, shooting from the hip. They're not. They are terribly unproductive. They write bad code and produce shoddy software, and they threaten their projects by taking giant risks which are completely uncalled for.
-- http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000036.html
So if you don't really know how to plan because you don't understand the common set of patterns (but instead just treat everything like a nail cause all you got is a hammer), you're gonna just write code like crazy and eventually hit a wall and be like what happened? This could occur if the code becomes way too entangled or you do things in some unique idiosyncratic style and then just ditch the project and the next guy is like uh? I think business risk here is pretty obvious. Patterns create cohesive, uniform solutions that can be expanded on. Antipatterns slowly eat away at the project.
So if this guy's components are intelligently decoupled -- and he took the time to plan that -- but the other programmers can't understand the pattern, who's really at fault? That's the crux of the issue if you're a guy like Joel working with gunslingers. It's not long before they turn their guns on you as the problem 'cause they're threatened. Now, just being realistic here, I think if this happened to the guy 4x he either is amazing and should go work for Google or has some other kinda attitude problem. I just wanted to counter the point that real world code doesn't need to concern itself with inheritance or composition patterns.
Your time is free and will continue to be so. As a human, hey you got some time left and if you got goals, well then perhaps you haven't time to waste. Yet, if you wish to speak of "reality", you must tell me who's the one demanding any payment for any second of your time? Is it no one but yourself? Is it not your idea of what that time could have (perhaps _should_ have)? No, that's not reality -- that's your superego, which is in your own head.
You should watch your tongue a little more carefully; it's rude to reply "no time is free" when it's not at all the topic of conversation. You deserved to get downvoted for that reply and the reason you're getting downvoted for this one is that it's too binary. Lighten up. All someone said is "I do this in my free time" and you had to step in as protector of truth and say "no such thing." There's no valor in this behavior.
https://github.com/joslinm/CSL/blob/9371f97a4e43b7f756edfd44...
The first major program I made was for what, so I can download many albums at once after my hard-drive failed. What had a feature known as "Collector" which gave you a zip of an artist's discography. With my program, you could dump that zip right in and it would send it to utorrent downloading in a structured directory (per user settings). I would have never taken it as far as I did (GUI from command line tool) if it weren't for the community loving it and giving me feedback to make it better & better. I called it "collector's secret lover".[1]
Another one I did was for nice looking release info of torrents called generically "description generator". It gave users an easy way to grab all relevant info (from discogs) for an album upload so they can copy and paste [2]
This is a sad day, what.cd was much more than a place to just download music.
Instead, OP says "first find out how they got to that position in life" which you gotta understand does come across pretty smug since it implies superiority of opinion/belief and degenerates the disagreer as if they are merely using emotion in their logic.
I think ideally you first want to let the battle of logic fly then get into biography details if it's a very sharp disagreement. It may be worthwhile for both sides to hear each other's upbringing and catalyst -- though you might not take the other's lens as your own, it nevertheless will add a little wisdom
I just clustered ES with Docker somewhat recently. It was pretty good at discovery I must say. Well, I'm no great search engineer I just throw these things up when I need 'em so good to know all this. Thanks again.