systemizer

Good point. I agree the word "productivity" is bundled up with many meanings, and it could be a whole study in-itself to unpack it. Preliminarily, I'd say productivity is pragmatic towards-which one identifies oneself (a hunter hunts, a writer writes, etc).

I've been reading Being and Time recently, and Heidegger makes an interesting distinction between what is "ontic" (a writer writing, for example) and "ontological" (a writer investigating the state of being behind writing). In this context, productivity interestingly can be in both the following ideas:

Ontically, productivity writing a book. Ontologically, productivity is understanding of the way of being a writer comports oneself to be a writer.

I think both ideas are equally important. I'm not sure why I'm writing this; maybe to address the difficulty with pinning down a consensus of what productivity means. but happy saturday!

Thanks for the writeup. I think you're right: the idea of external validation / accountability is definitely involved here as well.

And I think it's easy to read what I wrote to mean that "shame is objectively bad," but that was not my intention. The intention was more to question (and possibly reevaluate) our own relationships to it.

> I find happiness from productivity because I try my best to work on projects that I find meaningful

In the end, it comes down to what makes you thrive, and only you can answer that. Productivity, in its most general sense, can be a way to achieve that. At the same time, for me, it is healthy to question these assumptions every once in a while.

Good points! I agree the feeling of shame is pre-reflective. At the same time, I think we have the possibility of comporting ourselves in a way-of-being that better copes with shame. For me, By reflectively using your pre-reflective feeling of shame as a tool for productivity feels wrong (and this is personal and I don't have the best words right now to expound that feeling)

Okay, so shame exists because it is good for a society that is built on shame? I don't mean to be derogatory in anyway, but the fact something is stabilizing doesn't mean it is good. I believe there are better ways to build relationships with others

Yes, I'm not questioning whether one would be more productive (I think actually someone would be more productive!). It's the value of this productiveness in the context of manipulating shame. Maybe for you shame is not a factor here, and that's great. I can only know me, and for me, the act of having someone watch over my shoulder (and only watch over my shoulder) as I work would have some level of shame/guilt involved.

No, I'm not referring to pair programming. That is a dialogue between two people working to get something done (no shame involved).

I'm focussing more on the aspect of having someone looking over your shoulder. Just a pair of eyes to watch you work (which I don't equate with pair programming)

Anybody else get an immediately negative visceral reaction from this? If I'm understanding this correctly, the aim is to manipulate our sense of shame/guilt to boost productivity.

After sitting with the feeling for a bit, here are some ideas that come to mind:

1. Maybe we should ask why we feel shame/guilt in the first place. Is it "normal" to feel this? If it isn't we should not rely on it for our happiness (or productivity).

2. What is the value of productivity? Why does it make us happy?

For me, guilt/shame is something to be overcome, not used as a tool. And the value of productivity is something that has been handed down to us by a culture which we've been thrown into. And (at least for me), it's our duty to question these ideas instead of merely giving into them to self-reinforce themselves.

You're right; I don't know OP, and I've probably made some assumptions that are incorrect, but that's just the inevitable consequence of stating anything positively. I did, however, try not to attempt to state anything about OP's personal character or feelings. My initial inspiration for my comment was based on the quote you mentioned above: he channeled his anger/frustration into his craft. To me, that sounded like he found a dwelling in his craft for programming, and it reminded me of one of my own personal experiences

A passion is something that is personal and internal. It's your direct experience with a craft that is becomes a natural extension of you. When you change your relationship to that craft such that you require some external means, it no longer becomes purely internal. In today's culture, which (I believe) overvalues monetization and productivity, it is easy to be swept into external desires for accomplishment. And, even if you do achieve your goals, it is very difficult to go back to re-experience the original internal, personal relationship you enjoyed with that craft

Given the post's lack of detail relating to the experience of creating the game itself, I fear OP is treating his craft as a means to an end; instead of loving his craft for what it is. I fell into a similar trap when, after leaving my job to pursue my "passion," I became my own slavemaster, treating myself as resource for production, and eventually learned to hate my once cherished activities. I hope OP's game succeeds; regardless, I would not recommend, to anyone, to pursue a personal hobby, dwelling, or passion as a means to reaching some external reward.

I think the point being stated is that exercising shouldn't be seen as a means to an end for living-the-longest-life.

well, we can think of the synthesis as returning to monolithic services with the understanding the sufferings of microservices.

yup. basically Hegel's dialectic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialectic#Hegelian_dialectic

Thesis --> Antithesis --> Synthesis

The person came forward with the device and it was determined that the phone wasn't actually a Galaxy Note 7, but was just named that way. We were very close to being diverted though.

I was on this flight. The flight wasn't late; but we almost had to be diverted because no one came forward with the device. It took about 30 minutes and 4-5 reminders from the flight attendant and pilot to resolve the issue, making me think the person either forgot he renamed it to that or he himself was pranked and didn't realize his phone was renamed until he took a second look. I was hoping someone didn't buy a galaxy note 7 as a gift and had it in a bag somewhere. But yeah, definitely one of the more interesting flights i've been on :/

If you're interested in learning the basics of reductive synthesis, I recommend Syntorial (http://www.syntorial.com/). It teaches in an interactive way by first playing a tone and then asking you to configure the synthesizer to make that same sound. It covers everything from oscillators, adsr, lfos, reverb/delays, and more.

How does everyone else modularize their javascript? I'm kind of a noob when it comes to this (jQuery spaghetti, cough cough), so I'm really interested in this subject.

This article was awesome; definitely going to take a look at the example code when I get home!

I don't understand how a service can be both secure and centralized. You'd have to give 100% of your trust to a single entity. I'm not pointing fingers, but DDG is a good example of this situation.

If you want greater security, you have to allocate trust amongst many entities. This is a practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance problem (http://techtv.mit.edu/videos/16444-practical-byzantine-fault... ).

My current trust model is primarily made up of my friends and family; not a third party organization online, regardless of how they market it. If I put my trust in them, my security would only be compromised if ((N-1)/3) worked together. (see http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/6.824-2012/papers/castro-practical...) Wouldn't my activity be more secure if it was built upon that?

I'm not proposing any implementations; just food for thought.

Cool. I'm curious: what was your motivation for doing this rather than using Chef's encrypted data bags?

Is it because it's tightly integrated with IAM? If that's the case, does that mean you guys use a cookbook that tightly couples system users with IAM roles?

This isn't a job, but if you follow #hack4good on twitter or geeklist's hack4good feed (https://geekli.st/#hack4good ), there are some cool projects going on around social good. Most recently there was a hackathon around the typhoon that hit the Philippines.

Like the idea of using Geohashes to quickly search for "near" objects and then using the client's processing to extract lat/lngs. I've setup postgis before and it was more of a hassle than I wanted it to be. This alleviates some of the pain :)

I don't have a good answer for you, but let me shoot a question back at you: "How do you determine whether the code you're looking at is good or bad?" Surely, there's an algorithm you run in your head that looks at specific features of the code and analyses them. All I'm saying is that there may be a way to automate that algorithm and use it to drive incentives. Even if the algorithm is as simple as "make sure X and Y unit tests pass."

Self-maintained groups and incentives based on performance. It would be interesting to adopt this in the tech area: the amount and quality of your unit tests means you get paid more.

You can also do code analysis: look at branching factors; code duplication; runtime performance; etc

This might be hard to implement in a company setting; but it may be easier to apply with contracting work.

No, that is correct. He left his hard drive and laptop in the SIPB office in W20. See the Tech's article from August 2011.

http://tech.mit.edu/V131/N30/swartz.html

Perfect. now his average is at 3.14! Good job, sir.

I'm sure we could create an anonymous payment system, however, it would come with a lot of constraints. For example, everyone in the network would pay X dollars to be a part of the anonymous network. Each person cannot pay more than X dollars so that money is conserved. When a transaction is executed, use a service like PayPal to choose a random account and transfer the funds where they need to go.

Yes, this is very insecure for various reasons, and your credit card statement will show up with something you didn't actually buy, but, anonymous payments could be achieved.

Of course, you would have to access the service with Tor for it to be completely anonymous.

I go to MIT and have taken graduate courses in OS design, database design, and distributed systems. I am more than aware of the issues of byzantine errors, fault tolerance, and replication, etc; however, my post is not about that. My post is about how to approach "hacking" a minimal viable product together and guidelines for making that process efficient. The issues that you present are not relevant to this post and can be abstracted away for this context.

You make good points, and I do agree that multi-platform applications require a general enough server-side interface for many different types of clients.

However, you're still going to initially design your application based on a single interface, whether that be an iphone, browser, or tablet. While the implementations will differ, the UX between all the clients should be consistent.

In the article, I put UI ahead of CRUD because I believe the UI is closer to the UX and better helps you achieve your UX. And by UI, I mean a very very simple user interface. Hold back your creative artsy mind and just make sure you have the actions on the page.

thanks for the comment.

Sorry about that guys. I just started using Blogger's new blog theme. I assumed they would account for javascript-disabled clients, but I was wrong. I'll fix that asap.

thanks!

I think the article is less about "communicating to the user" and more about "which users to target." Should we reevaluate ourselves as developers and build apps that target a larger, less tech-savvy audience?