nick_urban

Do something completely different. Don't code for a year.

If you loved it once, it will come back to you.

It's not that client-side applications are easier to reverse-engineer. If the application is all client-side, it can literally just be downloaded and reused by a would-be competitor.

I really wanted ActiveResource to work for me, but I had a few requirements that it couldn't meet, like camelCased attribute and resource names, HTTP caching, and the ability to change authentication at runtime without race conditions (since configuration is done at the class level in ARes).

I wrote a small gem called well_rested to replace ActiveResource in my project. It utilizes ActiveModel for validations and generally plays well with Rails. Maybe it will be useful to someone:

https://github.com/DeepWebTechnologies/well_rested

Thank you. Well said.

When I was a student of software engineering, I felt strongly that there was not enough emphasis given to what effect the use of computers has on humans, and what sort of software we ought to make to benefit humans. This is related to Tim O'Reilly's call to "Work on Stuff that Matters" (http://radar.oreilly.com/2009/01/work-on-stuff-that-matters-...). It's not about the machine or the money -- we must add value to people's lives.

This is a different issue than that of being kind to each other on Hacker News, but I happen to think it is deeply related.

In some circumstances, I am spontaneous, playful, and extremely open to my environment and aware of other people. When I spend a lot of time programming, however, I tend to become more cautious, analytical, and insensitive. Partly this is because any time spent programming is, generally speaking, spent away from people and in ignorance of our bodies (and hence, our environments). This is one reason why I think it is so important for engineers to have diverse interests.

It's not just so that we will be kinder to each other on Hacker News. We are, in a very significant way, the people building the future. We need to make sure that we are in the right frame of mind to build a future we want to live in, and not one that is anti-social and inhumane.

Perhaps the reason dystopian sci-fi has so much resonance is because we are already experiencing, unconsciously, the dehumanizing effects of technology.

Studying Zen made me realize that most of the teachings which people interpret moralistically (or theologically) actually point to a psychological reality.

Hackers frequently have an idea, build 90% of an MVP and then never launch. Why would they get so close and never cross the finish line?

It seems obvious: if you don't launch, you can't fail.

A subtle fear of rejection is understandably common in a population that experienced it frequently in their formative years.

That would be an incredible, sci-fi level achievement, but it would not be a "perpetual motion machine" in the common sense, because it would derive its power from the sun rather than producing it internally.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perpetual_motion

Thank you for a very clear, informative post.

I've thought about this a fair amount, and you still managed to explain it in a way that made it new to me.

You do credit to lawyerkind.

I can think of a few reasons:

1) MacBooks are pleasing to the eye. ThinkPads are well-designed functionally but ugly. Aesthetics don't matter to everyone, but to those for whom they do matter, they are not a frivolous concern. Working in an elegant environment (including hardware) can have a positive effect on one's state of mind.

2) A lot of people are interested in developing iOS apps. This is much easier on a Mac.

3) MacBooks are status items like designer clothing and may make people feel more attractive / successful. Obviously this is not universal but neither do I think it's a negligible effect.

Since our respect for cartoons is so great, some of it ought to wear off on "books", which apparently inspired them?

How about a high desk that you can stand at, with a stool or drafting chair for when you want to sit? A tall chair seems a lot easier / cheaper than an adjustable desk.

I agree with that as well. One subset of this is "The MBA Effect" where managers who are also engineers are replaced by profesional managers. This is what leads to things like trying to compete on lowest costs rather than building the best product. Steve Jobs was a great leader in the technology area, precisely because his vision wasn't about money. It was about excellence.

As for causes of economic distribution: liberals tends to emphasize the role of circumstances and conservatives tend to emphasize the role of individual effort. The error, however, is to become blinded to half the equation because it flatters the ego or is politically expedient. For instance, the successful who only see their own virtue at work (Wallstreet?), or the unsuccessful who only see the context and not their own failures (the "victim mentality").

I started programming because I was fascinated by computers. It wasn't until years later that I found out it was a lucrative job. It sounds like your recommendation would be for everyone to chase money regardless of their passions. You have to admit that people who are passionate about things that pay well get a better deal in that situation. There are a lot of things that are worthwhile that are not well rewarded economically. If all of the artists and idealists disappeared and we were only left with money-chasers, the world would be that much poorer.

Also, regarding success: hard work and intelligence matter a lot, but so does opportunity. Have a look at Gladwell's Outliers for an interesting analysis of this.

Thank's for introducing "regulatory capture" to my vocabulary. It does seem to capture much of what people are angry about (bailouts, etc.). I'm guessing you haven't heard it used by the protesters, it's because it sounds so academic. If they read the definition, though, I expect many would agree.

For the lazy: "when a state regulatory agency created to act in the public interest instead advances the commercial or special interests that dominate the industry or sector it is charged with regulating" (Wikipedia)

Are computers inefficient and software complex and unwieldly? Sure, but I suspect the sense of fatigue and disappointment is due mostly to the cause he mentions last: the irrelevance (or even hostility) of most computer applications to a life well lived.

"if your grandparents can’t use it out of the box to do something real... then it fails"

The problem is not the difficulty of software, or its aesthetic decline. The problem is that the most important things for human happiness -- such as autonomy, integrity, feeling of connection to a world larger than us and love for other human beings -- are mostly ignored or eroded by technology rather than improved by it. This is not something new to computer technology, but it does seem to be focused and hastened by it.

When you're a kid, it's easy to be enthralled by the wonder of the machine. I certainly was. As an adult, you don't have that anymore. You need to feel like you're working for something worthwhile. All of that complexity would be worth managing if we understood it as part of a struggle for something of magnitude. The feeling that it's all crap comes, as much as anything, from this lack of ends.

I agree that people who are capable of doing high level work should do so, but the comparison shouldn't be a high-powered lawyer vs. picking up trash, it should be: being a high powered lawyer vs. being a "high-powered leader" of a social movement. If Gandhi had decided to continue being a lawyer and donating his profits to charity, there's no way that all the cheap labor he could have hired would have added up to the kind of world-historical moment that his life did.

I don't think we're are doomed to be narcissistic, but it's very easy to be so. This is a question which deserves to be taken seriously. The author is expressing a position that a lot of people fall into without actually being comfortable admitting it.

I'm not sure what you're thinking of in particular, but I'm guessing that most talk about cybernetics in modern philosophy is derived from Heidegger's claim that in modernity, we lose any an ultimate referent for our chains of signification. Everything gets taken as for the sake of something else (e.g. as a resource to achieve some ends extrinsic to it), but there is no final "something else" to make it all meaningful. The reason he calls this "cybernetic" is because it deals with unending loops instead of the sort of hierarchical organization we might have seen in pre-modern times (e.g. with God at the top of the tree of meaning).

Philosophy often attempts to dip below accepted meanings and systems of thought. This may make it seem like philosophers "have no understanding of the technology they're trying to discuss", but in fact they aren't necessarily discussing technology in the sense which one might assume. They're trying to get at a completely different strata of thought than the "how-to" of any given technology.

Thank you for this essay. I understand that it's not, as some have already pointed out, particularly disinterested, but it set me to thinking, which is enough for me.

This essay calls for a return to hard problems. The "problem" with hard problems isn't that they're hard. That's actually exactly what we need about them. It the unyielding character of hard problems which makes them worth dedicating ourselves to. The greatest difficulty is not solving the problem (which isn't even strictly necessary to benefit from the investigation), but rather, in giving ourselves to the problem in the first place. How can we choose a problem when there are so many possibilities and we have so little foresight?

If we lived in a vacuum, the choice would be impossible or arbitrary. Luckily, our lives are not vacuums. The "real problems" (the things that matter to us, which come into our lives whether we like it or not, and generate actual experiences of significance) provide a point of departure. Real problems aren't technological in nature, but that doesn't mean they don't lead the way towards challenging technical projects. The space race didn't start as an engineering problem. It was the result of the longing of a people, of their hope and anxiety for the future. But as a result of that longing, of that fear and excitement, a lot of smart people dedicated themselves to hard technical problems and produced a huge array of breakthroughs. The trick, then, is to remain attentive to the problems around us, rather than giving into the temptation to ignore or adapt to them.

In order to refocus ourselves on the hard problems, it helps to acknowledge that they are what we want -- that we aren't really satisfied with a day's salary and that we want to push forward towards a life's work. Wouldn't everyone prefer to work on something substantial, on a 'hard problem' for the sake of a 'real problem'? I think so, but we often don't know where to start.

Can technology help us get started? I don't think "a Facebook" or "a Wikipedia" for hard problems is the answer, although either might help. In order to maintain the kind of excitement and reciprocal encouragement necessary to sustain a culture of hard-problem-solving, you need to put smart people who respect each other into the same physical space. You need to make hard- and real-problem-solving a lifestyle in order to overcome the creeping inertia of the trivial. This is why universities retain their relevance. They're a concentrated mix of intelligence, experience, and youthful idealism. They contain lots of people who think about "hard problems" (science, engineering) and "real problems" (philosophy, history, social thought). Universities have their own issues, of course. They suffer from institutional pressures that have more in common with the banalities of commerce and politics than with any dedicated enthusiasm. Historically they have been very successful, but it may be that the next wave of innovation will come from a less traditional source, perhaps from the real-life communities that sprout up around virtual groups like this one.

Unless people are actually interested in web typography.

Why should the person submitting the link (unless it's pg) make so much difference?

I see this sort of advice a lot, and frankly, it bothers me. There's nothing wrong with doing programming projects in your spare time, but it's hardly the most impressive thing you can do.

For a variety of reasons, there are many one-dimensional programmers out there -- people who seem to be only interested in computers and oblivious to everything else. Come on people, the world is wide. Programming is not the best way to become an enterprising, dynamic individual. Unless your company is anti-risk and boring, don't you want to hire people who are different from you? People who have taken crazy trips around the world and learned skills that provide lateral insights rather than just what you get out of sitting at a computer writing code and reading Hacker News?

If someone could provide evidence of doing something daring, that would show more initiative to me than a GitHub project.

I don't think this is meant to be serious.

Maybe on a quantum computer...

I wonder what effect this will have on HTML5 app development.

Would the Ruby developers who are considering building HTML5 apps go for native Ruby instead if given the option?

This is the first time I've heard about Foreman, and it looks like it could be very convenient for development. I appreciate the attempt to abstract from process requirement details in the same way that Gemfiles do for gems. I think there's the germ of a good idea here.

The example for a production environment, however, is pretty unpersuasive. Tools like Passenger (mod_rails) dynamically start and stop processes depending on load, number of requests, etc. That is much more useful than just saying "start four mongrels".

If you don't have any savings, and don't have any income other than from working, how do you expect to live anywhere without working? Are you staying at home right now?

The bay area is expensive, but it varies a lot depending on where you are. Here's a hint: don't live in San Francisco. Look for a place in the east bay with roommates. If you want easy access to SF, just make sure it's near a BART station. You can get a decent place for < $600/mo that way.

If you're a good programmer and you can network, you should be able to cover your costs while only working 10-20 hrs/wk. That said, it make take you a little while to get your foot in the door if you're fresh out of school.

If you want to go soon, there are going to be a lot of university kids subletting their places for the summer.

The bay area is a great place. You'll have fun living there. Good luck!

I don't particularly object to the idea that we hold some of our intelligence in our environment. I think it's true, and actually forms the basis for my objection. What I object to is that we should naively allow that environment to be changed from one which offers manifold possibilities for a full range of embodied engagement (the natural world and man-made things which relate to our bodies in a way which does not significantly restrict our possibilities, e.g. clothes or hand tools) into one which encourages superficial stimulus-response behavior and instant gratification according to pre-fabricated programs.

It sounded to me like Don Norman had already accepted that idea to the point that he didn't even realize it was a choice. He worries about a future of greedy carriers controlling our phone-brains. I worry about the fact that our minds could become so beholden to devices that, regardless of whether those devices are open or privately controlled, we diminish the depth of our experience and our tendencies towards reflective thought.

If drugs were available that increased our abilities but made us less thoughtful, would you accept that without deliberation? Would it really be better if those drugs were easy to make at home or handed out for free rather than sold in stores? This is already happening with Ritalin and "smart drugs". They improve our ability to carry out mental work but diminish our ability to reflect on what we are doing.

"Smart" drugs and phones are only so in terms of instrumental reason, not in terms of creativity or contemplation of ends.

Does it strike any one else as at least a _bit_ disturbing that he thinks his "mind" is in his smart phone, and finds no problem with this other than that service providers are greedy?

An obvious way to avoid becoming beholden to service providers is to retain some independence from our devices. It's not like people didn't travel before the invention of the iPhone.

Is this different from a VPS?

Looks like Linode has Debian 6 available too: http://blog.linode.com/2011/02/08/debian-6-squeeze/

The term "The man" may be glib in many cases, but if we understand that "the man is us" then we reach some place more fundamental.

Heidegger has a fascinating analysis of this phenomena, which he calls "Das Man" or "The They". Most of the time, all of us are "the they" instead of being authentically ourselves.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heideggerian_terminology#.27The...

Note: if you decide to read Heidegger, it may take as much time as a television habit.

Interesting. Sometimes we speak metaphorically of life's inertia. If the part of the brain that controls our actual movement also controls our habits of thought, I guess we are not far off!

Nietzsche said that all great thoughts are conceived while walking... perhaps this is why.