mcslee

I think you've picked the wrong target here.

Worth reading Dustin's personal account of his Burning Man experience: https://medium.com/i-m-h-o/radical-inclusion-vs-radical-self... (bear in mind this was written 13 years ago, I'm not sure Dustin would agree with everything stated, but the broad strokes feel correct.)

That post also explains Zuck's attendance. Zuck is not a Burner, it was a one-off visit encouraged by Dustin. Personally I think it was inconsequential in the long run but good for Zuck to have seen it.

The criticism you're raising about money being thrown at the event is broadly valid, but it does not at all apply to how Dustin approached it, IMO. Dustin did precisely what you are suggesting he didn't - slept in a tent, literally cooked and served grilled cheese sandwiches.

(Context: I was in the camp/village, attended 10 years 2009-2018, back once in 2025, have done a lot of playa art... and I also broadly agree with John Law's take.)

Thank you for that. As mentioned in some other comments, I've given up continuing to use Processing as an underlying application UI framework. It's unclear how long the OpenGL dependency is going to survive on macOS, or that Processing will have the dev resources to break the hard OpenGL dependency (sad side-thread on that topic: https://twitter.com/ben_fry/status/1709400641456501020)

Future version based upon lwjgl+bgfx will be more broadly available soon.

In the meantime thx for the quick fix!

The majority of the source code is publicly available, though no longer under a traditional open source license. Over time I came to realize I was not really cool with it being used commercially or rebranded without me having some say in that.

The core engine code (pure Java, no UI dependencies) is here: https://github.com/heronarts/LX

The Processing-based UI layer is here: https://github.com/heronarts/P4LX

My future version is moving to a UI based upon LWJGL + bgfx, as the project sort of outgrew Processing as it's become a full application.

This new UI layer is here: https://github.com/mcslee/GLX

I don't publish the code for all the application scaffolding and UI implementation, though everything's designed for extensibility and a sort of plug-in model where having access to that shouldn't be necessary to be able to use and customize the application's behavior.

As referenced in my other comment, this new version should hopefully be available by end of year and will be called Chromatik: https://chromatik.co/ - this will include more documentation! And the goal is for it to be easier to use, no IDE/GitHub required (that will still be available for those who want it), with simpler end-user licensing as found in typical media production software.

Mark here, creator of LX - thanks for posting! Apologies for the not-so-great state of that website and lack of documentation. I'm working on a proper repackaging and release of the application, rebranded as Chromatik, which should be a lot easier to learn and use. As with all software projects ever, this has taken longer than anticipated... hoping to have this finally out by end of calendar year.

User documentation is largely ready, but this website is still pre-official-launch: https://chromatik.co/guide/

Will reply to some of the other comments re: source etc. directly. And happy to answer any other questions about the project.

If your goal is to have people doing creative, innovative work, then I would strongly disagree that there is any advantage whatsoever to be derived from making people feel "locked in." In practice, I have only seen this achieve the opposite effect -- disengaged people hanging around longer than they should and poisoning the atmosphere for passion-driven folks around them.

Joe's post made it quite clear that Facebook's management strategy is to provide freedom and autonomy, not handcuffs. This is one of the key reasons people love working there. The only thing Facebook is "squandering" is the opportunity to be experienced as a corporate financial prison.

The idea that any of this would be driven by Zuck's personal desire for liquidity is way off the mark.

What a fantastic explosion of buzzwords and slightly bizarre assertions.

I know you interned at Facebook and are familiar with the site architecture, but the majority of the things you've mentioned here had absolutely nothing to do with the last outage, and it's far too early to draw any conclusions about the current unavailability.

I'm consistently surprised by how supportive or neutral a position the tech community (or Silicon Valley tech media) takes towards the Winklevoss brothers when they provide an avenue to attack Facebook or Zuckerberg.

These guys seem to be the antithesis of what Silicon Valley claims to be all about. They wield the benefits of a privileged American elite background masterfully, having top-brand lawyers work on their behalf whilst they attend top academic institutions and train for the Olympics. It's a far cry from Silicon Valley's purported do-it-yourself, boostrap-iterate-and-execute meritocracy. (This is not an ad hominem attack, just an account of apparently differing values/ideals.)

Yet, here folks are, on Hacker News, dispassionately contemplating whether they deserve $30 million or $60 million. Most folks working 80+ hour weeks on innovative startups, no matter how talented or even lucky they are, will never earn that kind of money.

If this were not connected to Facebook/Zuckerberg, I suspect that any discussion community like this would be absolutely overflowing with vitriol towards these characters.

Your point is well taken that it's easy to treat fortune differently in different situations. Hard workers that don't make it are "just unfortunate." Lazy people that win the lottery are "just fortunate." Hard workers that make it "earned it."

However, I think randomness (i.e. "fortune") generally plays a much larger role in all of our lives than we care to admit. The American obsession with hard work and merit fuels this misconception. Our brains are also somewhat intrinsically hardwired to intuit simple causes and effects, even when none truly exist.

If you're interested in the topic, I highly recommend reading "The Drunkard's Walk" by Leonard Mlodinow. http://www.amazon.com/Drunkards-Walk-Randomness-Rules-Vintag...

This is an astute and important point. I have always found it flawed that a middle-class American family making around $100K in income will pay more taxes than someone with $10M+ portfolio of municipal bonds.

With that said, I agree with Mark Cuban's philosophy here, and do not get personally upset with paying taxes.

I don't think the solution is to complain about taxes on high income earners. Rather, there just needs to be more pressure on instituting equivalent taxes for other forms of wealth generation (i.e. get rid of tax-free bonds).

Tufte makes many good insights, but I always struggle to get over the incredible ego in his presentations. He has a tendency to make sweeping aesthetic judgments based upon what, in my opinion, are simply his personal tastes, which he then passes off as arguments about "information density."

Many of the interfaces he criticizes for being "cartoony" are quite reasonably designed for the typical end-user, and probably more effective at communicating the basic information. People typically use the Weather app to find out what the temperature is outside right now. Adding "detail to clarify" is not helpful when no clarification is needed. It's 62 degrees out. Got it. We're done.

Similarly, I highly doubt many people are using the Stocks app on an iPhone to attempt to analyze thousands of points worth of historical data.

It also bears considering that many of the freebie apps bundled with the iPhone have a design goal of helping to sell iPhones.

I'm curious why you consider that embarrassing to admit? It's completely natural for human groups to seek gender balance.

Very few engineering schools let themselves get to such an extreme gender imbalance, but if you really were picking between an 80/20 split and a liberal arts school, I'm highly confident that you are much better off for having picked the liberal arts school.

Interesting, but I think this argument is flawed. The author notes that different professions tend to have different distributions of male personality types. Programmers tend towards meek and introverted, lawyers and businessmen more alpha, yet women don't shy away from those fields.

This seems to assume that women must magically all have the same personality type and/or no personality selection bias in their career choices. Since women are comfortable going head-to-head with alpha-male lawyers, they therefore should be totally comfortable with geeky programmers. I don't buy it -- all women are not the same, just like all men are not the same.

It seems to me that women who become lawyers or businesspeople likely have A-type personalities themselves. Accordingly, they are probably more likely to view competition or confrontation with males in the workplace as a motivating challenge. Women who become programmers are probably, just like male programmers, a bit more introverted and geeky. Accordingly, confrontation/competition with males in the workplace is probably less likely to be motivating, and more likely to be intimidating -- especially when you consider that many "meek" male programmer types tend to drastically overcompensate for insecurity in physical situations with hyper-competitive and vitriolic behavior in virtual environments (I wonder what the gender and programmer/non-programmer ratios are like on 4chan).

In other words, just because male programmers don't rank as alpha-males relative to the general male population doesn't mean they don't behave like alpha-males in their own environment, especially relative to the female personality types interested in becoming programmers.

My 2 cents.

Playing Devil's Advocate: if these simulations are truly modeled after humans, why are you so sure that they won't buy into many of the same religious ideas and reaffirm what many humans naturally think and do? Would a simulation like this even be aware that it was not just another person?

It seems like the answer to this question MUST be that the simulation cannot tell the difference between itself and a normal human. Otherwise, your argument is moot, because the religious folk will simply be able to point at this thing and say "clearly this thing is different from us -- it even knows that it's different, so obviously this is not the way our 'souls' work."

Interesting article. Can't help but think about how it's no coincidence that so many technology companies have come to exist in such close physical proximity in Silicon Valley. This article speaks to managing a team, but the power of the Pond metaphor goes well beyond single companies/teams.

I'm surprised the general response here is so negative. Besides the fact that it's obvious, research does in fact confirm that happier people smile more. And the average high school student is probably not focused on being cynical and grumpy whilst having his/her picture taken (though perhaps cultural norms around pictures have changed over the past decades).

Anyways, couple the happiness-smiling connection with a few other facts about human psychology, and this makes a lot of sense. (1) Emotional states in humans are contagious. We naturally tend to empathize with one and other, laugh together, and cry together. (2) We also naturally tend to mimic physical gestures made by people we are interacting with, often subconsciously. (3) Facial expressions actually influence our emotional state. Being happy makes us smile, but also smiling actually makes us happier.

It doesn't seem much of a leap from there that happiness would correlate inversely with divorce. In my take, this article is just reaffirming that naturally happy people are less likely to divorce.

Here's another interesting article about the contagiousness of happiness: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=9784878...

What a revelation: students who only study an hour per week are heavy Facebook users.

...and YouTube. ...and CollegeHumor. ...and probably a thousand other sites.

This article is a joke. It's 2009. What do we expect to find kids with poor study habits in dorm rooms with high-speed internet connections and no cable TV doing?

Facebook, or any individual site, is a red herring here, IMO. Facebook just happens to garner a disproportionate amount of the traffic.

One issue with data-driven design is that it can be incredibly inefficient for developing new behaviors. If you're changing hues, sure, it works. When it comes to building a novel interaction that might really push the needle, users typically won't learn it overnight. You can't test even two or three significant UI changes without incredible patience and inefficiency, because the data effects might not materialize for weeks, and the user re-education costs at each step are very high.

This effect is multiplied when you're trying to test design changes in products where users need to interact with one another (makes testing new design on only a subset of users incredibly difficult). Data-driven design in these contexts will likely just tell you to stick with what already seems to work.

At the moment, it's unclear if Google's really in the business of developing new user behaviors. They're operating a cash machine with reasonably well-understood dynamics, and will probably do pretty well just tuning it. I think this may turn out to be a strategic issue for them in the long run, but for now it seems like the answer is simple: if you're a talented visual or interaction designer, don't expect to have much fun working at Google.

> I would be sincerely interested in this topic, if you would like to go there. :)

Sure, do you blame consumers for buying clothing products that were manufactured using sweatshop labor? No, because the consumer had no intent. You blame the company that operates the sweatshops.

Do you blame civilians in Africa or the Middle East for the atrocities committed against aid workers? No, because the starving civilians have no intent of hurting aid workers. You blame the corrupt governments that perpetrate the atrocities.

Your argument when it comes to drugs rests upon the combination of current legal status and some moral presuppositions. I think the question of moral acceptability is orthogonal here. It is empirically true that people will purchase and use drugs, no matter what your moral sensibilities tell you.

Blaming the consumer is a fruitless effort when it comes to actually promoting better health and safety in society.

This argument could just as well be used to claim that our government is acting immorally by continuing to enforce policies that all evidence suggests promote violence.

In symbolic terms: government:drug laws == consumer:drugs

We can fix things on either side. Moral arguments are irrelevant -- we should fix whichever side yields the most productive result.

The vast majority of people who buy and use drugs are also usually not involved in large organized crime units. This argument doesn't hold water.

Many illegal drugs are not addictive, or significantly less addictive than nicotine or alcohol. While some drugs are highly addictive, the laws are simply not based upon addictive potential. Even some of the most highly propagandized super-scary-drugs (LSD, Mescaline, MDMA) are not physiologically addictive.

Neither of these arguments are cogent.

Jimmy Carter made an excellent quote about the penalties for drug use.

"Penalties against possession of a drug should not be more damaging to an individual that the use of the drug itself."

http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Jimmy_Carter

You're arguing for the other side now. You just (correctly, IMO) attributed the violence of the drug trade to the fact that it is illegal.

There's no violence in the tobacco or alcohol trades, largely because they are legal and regulated. It is a logical fallacy to blame the consumer for systemic violence.

You state: "But if you honestly believe that there is nothing morally wrong with intentionally and actively enabling people into addiction, I doubt that the gap between our views on morality can be bridged."

Do you believe that liquor stores, grocery stores, corner shops, restaurants, and bars are all immoral? Should their owners refuse service to any customers that they believe to be at risk of alcoholism? Should pharmacies do background checks on customers purchasing Tylenol to determine whether or not they are addicted to painkillers? I think this argument boils down to legality, not morality.

I think the point originally being made was that a significant portion of drug dealers are NOT intentionally enabling people into addiction. Certainly this varies by drug dealer, and there is a big difference between selling marijuana and selling heroin or crack. A lot of these dealers are simply supplying people with a product that they are purchasing for personal use because they think it makes their life better.

I think it's also important to recognize that morality is subjective, and that it's one of America's founding principles not to legislate morality. Your belief that something is immoral, or even the belief of the majority, is not significant justification for legislation.

Sort of a tangent, but are you sure your opinion of Ecstasy isn't just a result of propaganda from "the man?"

I'm not saying it's safe, and the subject certainly warrants more scientific study. However, UK scientists did a risk-based analysis of common drugs of abuse, which resulted in MDMA being placed below alcohol, tobacco, and cannabis.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/6474053.stm

To my earlier point, I think the real solution here is education and greater availability of scientifically valid information.

I guess I just don't see the end goal of what you're proposing. What is the merit of having a drug-free society if it comes at the cost of damaging or destroying productive, happy human lives? Do you think the world you are describing would be a better world to live in than the one we have today? Or one in which more drugs were legal?

As various other commenters have pointed out, between prescriptions, over-the-counter pills, vitamins, and additives in the foods we buy, we're all drug users. This whole argument seems to rest upon an absolutist view that all currently illegal drugs are absolutely destructive and have no merit.

Countries like Singapore and China have radically different ideological approaches to policy than most Western nations. They are comfortable enforcing absolutist positions that limit individual freedoms. Such a position is against America's founding principles. They may statistically report less drug use, but is their society actually any better off for it?

This would probably work for about 1 month. After everyone finished reeling in horror from the senseless murders of many of their families and loved ones, some subset of the people would quickly realize that all the competition had just been eliminated from the drug market, rendering it extremely profitable and lucrative. Time to stop whatever they were doing to start producing and selling drugs instead.

(Were you really being serious?)

Your argument seems a bit inconsistent. While I generally understand the spirit of what you're saying, claiming that "over 50% of the US population has tried it to little effect" doesn't seem any less anecdotal than your example of the friend trying "X" 3 or 4 times.

All these substances should be assessed scientifically for medical risk, and empirically for societal risk.

Asking for dealers to be shot on a drug-by-drug basis is a bit sensationalist. Drug dealers simply respond to demand in the market. They sell whatever people are buying -- they don't have personal agendas about which drugs to sell. Demand for drugs is notoriously inelastic.

I'd modify your last statement to say that people tend to dump all illegal drugs into one bin, and legal drugs into another. Most everyone seems to think legal drugs are safe, but people tend to be split on illegal drugs (some think they're all the worst things ever, others seem to falsely presume they are all reasonably safe).

Personally, I think there needs to be more and better education across the board. The legal/illegal distinction is rarely meaningful and detracts attention from a proper comparative analysis of drugs and their risks. For example, fentanyl is more powerful than both heroin and morphine, yet is a legally prescribed painkiller. Similarly, Adderall has a family-friendly reputation for helping kids study, yet along with its use come many of the same risks associated with speed. This is not surprising, because they are in fact the same thing -- amphetamines.

Why are you so eager to jump to their defense, but so reluctant to ask that they treat me with courtesy, dignity, and respect?

I do, however, agree with you. As I mentioned in the note, I did spend a lot of time responding courteously to a great deal of personal user feedback. Having invested significant time doing so, I know and fully appreciate the difference it makes. I am also personally appreciative when I am on the receiving end -- I enjoy the thoughtful personal feedback people take the time to send me, even if it is critical.

I only responded in this manner to the most intensely offensive and bigoted messages received. I was sent thousands of personal messages in the span of a few days, a pretty good portion of which suggested I should die.

I also agree with diN0bot. The professional decision is to simply ignore personal attacks in a professional context. In this case I can ask forgiveness for a momentary lapse, call attention to the tricky distinction between personal and professional contexts on Facebook, and chalk some of this behavior up to stress relief during a period of highly intense work.

I've re-posted the note so that anyone can access it: http://eff-yeah.com/fb_note.html

I admit that my responses were mildly snarky, and I acknowledged in the note the blurry distinction between my behavior as an individual vs. employee of Facebook. But I maintain that my responses could all have been comfortably delivered in person, as an individual.

A few important points/questions:

- Was I acting as an individual or as an employee of Facebook? This is a very difficult question. We set up and publicized numerous official channels for user feedback on the new profile. Of course, we would never respond in this manner through those channels. These individuals all elected not to use those channels and instead sent personal messages to my individual Facebook account. I understand that this will still largely be viewed as acting on behalf of the company, but I think the question of context is a very important one. Where do we draw the line between personal use of Facebook, and use as an employee? Was I interacting with customers or individuals?

- I didn't violate any data privacy. These people sent personal messages to my Facebook account, which granted me permission to view their profiles (as natrius correctly pointed out).

- In the note I posted, I removed the last names of everyone who messaged me. David, Carissa, and Derek are hardly unique identifiers.

- These were all blatant cases of hate mail. I'm not a lawyer, but some of these would likely have held up in court as charges of assault. Characterizing any of these as a "feature request / bug report" is honestly quite a stretch.

Here's the note in question. I wrote it, and I think your comment mischaracterizes its true nature. http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=27551539159&id=...

The purpose of both my note and my personal replies to the hate-mail I received was not to express hostility. Rather, both were attempts to call attention to how the veil of anonymity provided by the Internet changes the way people treat each other, often for the worse. Not too different from the Hacker News Guidelines: "Be civil. Don't say things you wouldn't say in a face to face conversation."

My intent in calling out Christianity was not to mock, but rather to make people reconsider their own behavior by viewing it through the lens of a belief system they feel strongly enough about to post on their Facebook profiles.

Happy to discuss further if you still feel my post was inflammatory.