cell303

People are losing their minds over this. Barely anything web3 has even been built yet. Perhaps it never will. Still, the idea that young people want to do things differently is so terrifying to these geocity boomers that they must churn out pamphlets like their life depends on it. Embarassing.

saw this recently on HN: Men not at work: Why so many men aged 25 to 54 are not working[1]. I know that "not working" and "not leaving your bedroom" are differnt things, but maybe that's what makes it "American".

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13795397

Actually, I think they can (also be entrepreneurs and artists) They just can't all be successful ones. However, due to the non-linearity of success, the winners would offset the losers, which is also why incubators like y combinator can make a profit.

So what it boils down to really is a social issue, where you have to find a way to ensure a fair treatment of the losers. Theoretically they were just as likely to be huge successes (I think this is especially true for artists) as those who actually turned out to be. If that wasn't true one could easily run a successful incubator on their own.

However, culturally, the idea of compensating the losers seems alien (and even outrageous in some places) as we used to live in a economy with a much more linear relationship between effort and return. I guess this is why ideas like 'basic income' have such a hard time being even discussed, although they would address the issue, maybe even solve it.

What sales figures won't tell you though is how well people are doing who choose not to buy or can't afford those things.

Also, your argument does not account for tomorrows sales figures, which might look very different, as executives from any industry that software has replaced can tell you. Of course that could never happen to us.

This is a rather unusual comment and this link is probably the wrong place to have this conversation, as hacker news is probably the wrong place in general.

Anyway, it's rather simple. It's just taking what we have seen in the past (people appropriating any kind of technology thrown at them [1]) and extending it into the future.

Is this the correct approach? Probably not.

I like to remind myself that there was a time when smoking was the thing to do. Little knowledge about potential dangers was available. Projections about future adaption of the habit might have looked similar.

[1]: Strictly speaking this is not true, since there is a huge cemetery of rejected technology that remains mostly invisible. Smartphones just turn out to be one of the technologies that have become widely accepted, creating a wrong impression overall.

I was terrified after reading this. Reminded me that I should live a bit healthier, not drink more coffee then water, got to sleep earlier, wake up earlier, maybe even exercise. But more important, it got me thinking. The non-routine kind of thinking. Read some old diary entries. Wrote a new one, after almost a year.

Actually Apple has just accomplished what privacy advocates around the world couldn't have done: Getting people concerned about the issue (by hitting them where it actually hurts: music taste). I think it's a great and mostly innocent example (the music is really, really shitty though) of the problems that 'the cloud' poses.

I personally enjoyed this comment and this type of humor in general. It was witty, critical and open about it's satirical nature, distinguishing it from a troll post (which would disguise itself as genuine extremist view). Unfortunately the community doesn't seem to enjoy it as much as I do. Quite the opposite actually.

The comment specifically touches the following issues.

* The community's overall pro-western tendency

* Pointing out that the parent comment has been one of the few moderate ones in a thread that has otherwise been rather 'emotionally charged'

As much as I enjoy the content and the discussions here, the lack of appreciation of satire has always puzzled me.

I disagree with the lottery notion. There are two important differences:

In a lottery you know exactly what your odds of winning are and what the (best) possible outcomes are. In the App Store on the other hand, the odds are more or less unknown (which is why this post is interesting in the first place, I guess).

They are also dependent on a variety of factors, including your marketing success, quality of the game, etc. As an independent app developer it's difficult if not impossible to get a grip on those numbers. On the other hand, if you are Kim Kardashian there are probably some calculations you can do that give you an idea about how well your game is going to do (FYI: There is a Kim Kardashian game. Also a person named Kim Kardashian)

The second difference to a lottery is, that in the App Store you do not have an upper bound for your success. It could be anything form zero (most likely) to flappy-bird-crazy and beyond.

So do these differences matter after all?

Yes, because they dictate what kind of game you have to make, or in other words what kind of risks you are able to take: While major publishers have to stick to "mee-too" variations of game concepts that are known to work, you as a hobbyist can try out radical ideas. Things that are "never going to work". You face a limited amount of loss (the time it takes to make the game) but face a (virtually) unbound gain. This also means that the 1-week variety is much more promising, just not the "mee-too" ones.

Speaking of irrational fears: I always fear that I forgot my keys while leaving my flat. Now I know that I just need to post some holiday pictures of myself on instagram and eventually somebody will show up to help me get back in - for free!

This reminds me of Kenneth Goldsmith's notion of "Uncreative Writing" (In a nutshell: There is enough text out there, don't write anything yourself) From the looks of it, this would be a nice visualisation and way to trace that kind of writing.

I just have to ask. If it really is that way, what would prevent the maintainers of open source projects to issue (more or less worthless) "shares" of their projects? Could this be a way to pay open source developers?

Sorry for the deliberately stupid question but: What if I need to login somewhere on my phone?

This is great for writing scientific articles, manuals, tutorials, text books and the like. I'll start using it right now :)

However, as far as literature is concerned, I'd not be using it. The title is misleading in that respect. Something along the lines "simple", "clean", "focused" writing would be better.

BTW: I have to paste some page-sized sentences from Thomas Pynchon in there.

I really don't know how to say this without sounding like a complete bozo, but I really think that this is a very, very sad perspective on life.

It tries to quantify every aspect of life (or rather: disregards any aspect that can't be quantified) and therefore leads to a view of the world that is completely mechanic.

What's worse are it's dogmatic undertones. It kind of suggests that these are general rules that apply to everyone. And if you don't want to be a loser you have to play by those rules.

Games have winners and losers. Who is to become a winner or a loser is decided by some arbitrary rules that are predefined and can't be changed. Is that the kind of mental mindset that you want to equip yourself with? That you will be either a winner or a loser, by the standards of other people? Please, we already have a high chance of getting burnout in our profession. You don't have to forcefully increase it.

So as a little comic relief, here is a quote form the article:

> When your willpower is low, you are only able to do things you really want to.

By contrast, here is a quote from Bob Dylan that I happen like:

> A man is a success if he gets up in the morning and goes to bed at night and in between does what he wants to do.

So if you want to be a success by the standards of Dylan, you know what to do ;)

I like that thought, but I think its wrong. or at least it's only true on average. But the average is not really interesting when you are in a domain that's heavily dominated by exceptions. See this distribution of youtube views for reference http://socialblade.com/blog/2012/05/10/youtube-view-distribu...

so i'd rather say: for everything created, there are either 100 people expressing an opinion and 1000 people reading it / or none.

This really struck me: "Preventing burnout is part of your job. Staying well rested is part of your job". Many would rather consider optimizing one's productivity as being part of the job, usually by introducing new self management techniques, faster typing, etc (thinking of the lifehacker variety). However all these gains would be obliterated by a single burn out (think of it as a Black Swan event).

Staying well rested comes not only first, but will also increase your productivity when measured over a longer period.

I'd like to contrast that with current HR practices. Why is it that HR departments (as far as I can tell) focus on hiring "the best" or "the best available", while it would be more important, easier and cheaper to simply avoid "the worst" (aka this guy).

Why make the implicit assumption that investment banking is at most socially worthless? The scale doesn't end at 0 here. When evaluating the utility of things (could also be technology) than the cumulative effect can be negative as well.

Didn't they collectively lose more than they ever made in 2008? (and didn't they do so in 1987 already?) How exactly was the free market at work when the government bailed them out?

This really seems like a trivial problem but it's one that has been bothering me ever since. I've found it to be too stupid to even address this, even though I assume that a "non-trivial" amount of development time is wasted because of it.

As a perfectionist I'm more often than not engaged in rewriting code "the right way". Generally I've found it hard to accept that there are so many ways of doing things. Worse, some solutions perform better while others are easier to read. Even worse, there's usually a trade-off between those two.

To address this I've came up with two ideas. The first would be a language that would be ultra-restrictive, so that there could be only a limited number of ways of doing things. However my guess is that this has been tried and failed.

The other idea would involve some clever IDE and/or version control system, that would allow different versions of constructs to co-exist. In other words there would be different "views" on any piece of code. In fact, this is already the case with documentation which can be seen as a "natural language" view on the code.

This would solve the "The Narcissism of Small Code Differences"-dilemma, as every programmer could keep his favourite version. But what's more interesting: Based on the assumption that rewriting code for ideological reasons is common behaviour that can't just be stopped, it would be nice (and more efficient) if the rewritten code could at least serve some other purpose. As different versions of a function exist, they could be invoked based on some criteria (probabilistic or as a fallback) with the intent of increasing fault-tolerance.

Of course having a fallback is part of the motivation for version control systems, but these are not able to utilize different versions in a systematic way/at runtime, at least not as far as I know.

it's not so much about the reproduction of the person as of the idea.

Well, feel free to take any medicine you want, whenever something hurts or you feel depressed, basically every time you want to adjust any body function. Never mind side effects and let evolution take its course.

Or is it the science based population that will be thinned out? Taking into account iatrogenesis (look it up) basically anything that takes you away from a doctor will be beneficial to you. However, this does not apply when dealing with servere diseases. In that case you no longer need to worry about side effects and this is where science-based medicine really shines.

This reminds me, playing WoW has been so much about names for me. Together with a friend we poked fun out of other people with stupid names or gave credit to creative ones.

Usually I had a strong opinion about somebody's playstyle and age, even educational and social background upon reading a name (Not that I was ever right in these opinions, but what's interesting is that I had them).

What's even more interesting is that we even "discriminated" characters with bad names when the game mechanic allowed us to do so (ganking, kicking out of groups,..)

So I'm not sure whether there is a correlation between playstyles and names, but it certainly makes a difference in players behaviour towards each other.

Isn't there the spark rendering engine that can be used independent of meteor? https://github.com/meteor/meteor/wiki/Spark

I haven't tried it, but it seems like cleaner approach than cutting the patient in half.

Moving away from "the best available" towards "not the worst possible" (who could potentially destroy our company) would be a good idea.

why don't we take this discussion over to http://longbets.org/ (and put some money behind it, so eventually people mean what the say)

I don't see why so much cynicism is needed to describe perfectly normal economic behaviour.