unalone

Huh, that's an interesting way to feel! I wish I remember what AIM felt like better; I was so young when I used it that any chance I had to IM people was exciting. I was probably an absolute pain in the ass.

D'you think this could be — at least in part — because Facebook is an always-on environment for a lot of people? They're not explicitly on to chat, so there's more of an unstated barrier to beginning a conversation.

Somebody got aggressive after being detained for hours on end and having their flight cancelled, at expense? Holy shit! Pack your bags, men: we found ourselves a terrorist.

We need better design in the world in general. I'd hate to think only one company gets to be the designer-of-good-and-popular-things at a time.

And putting politics "in front of his art" will probably convince some of the, you know, thousands of people who read his blog posts on Hacker News and elsewhere, that maybe his books are worth picking up and buying.

Regardless, what you said was pretty rude.

The government is not a monolithic entity. The evils of intrusive surveillance doesn't make, say, social programs, or economic regulation, evil just because they're other large government programs. Libertarianism is great if you're already wealthy; it's... problematic... if you're starting off from a position of relatively little power.

> I prefer my sci-fi writers to be dedicated libertarians. So maybe, if you aren't, don't publicize it.

This is astonishingly condescending of you.

Marco's not attempting to communicate clearly in the sense of "push data down foobarbazqux's infohole." He's trying to communicate clearly in the sense of "grab foobar's attention, state his perspective provocatively, and attempt to not only reach an audience but make them think and talk."

Clearly he's succeeded, from the conversation going on in this post. Marco is occasionally pretty obnoxious, and his ideas are frequently not always well thought-out, but I like writers who attempt to be not only clear, but compelling.

Paul Graham has plenty of terrible essay names, and plenty of terrible essays at that. One of the things that frustrates me about him as a writer is that on occasion he attempts to strike an "objective" tone while offering a skewed and entirely subjective perspective. Besides, conveying pure abstract information should not be the point of an essay. Tone, emotion, purpose, and construction should all be deliberate. Otherwise you get Mashable—ultraspecific titles geared to ultraspecific articles which are so drained of anything beyond pure bullet-point content that you could train a machine to read and interpret it. It's such a waste.

It takes you two seconds to click on a link and look at it, ten seconds tops to decide if you're going to gain something by reading it. If you're clicking on so many links per day that twelve seconds here and there is putting a dent in your productivity/well-being, then there is a worse problem here than ambiguously-titled essays, and ironically, it's a problem that you'll start to solve by seeking more challenging pieces of writing to tackle to distract yourself from the constant useless information mill that the Internet so readily provides.

If you think that treating genders equally has nothing to do with accepting variations in social norms, then you're missing pretty much the whole purpose of the "treat women equally to men" thing.

Gender inequality is almost wholly a social problem, not a biological one. And

> It's not a huge sacrifice to voluntarily use the best product in a category. The number of Apple employees who want to use a non-iphone device is probably less than two percent.

You know, I am a huge Apple fan, but I don't like this argument. It suggests there are no valid reasons to prefer Android or even Windows to iOS, when in fact both Android's and Windows's designs offer a number of features that iOS lacks. While I don't think either come within spitting distance of iOS's build quality, there are plenty of reasons to want to use them anyway.

Particularly since Apple is a company which hires plenty of programmers, I imagine there'd be plenty of users who want to use an open-source phone OS. Unless they're all jailbreaking their iPhones, which would be pretty amusing actually.

This is silly logic.

If you were really treating women equally to men, you wouldn't follow a "what's good for one is good for the other" policy. You'd accept that the norms and behaviors of each gender should be held in equal regard, and adapt your own behavior to the person or group of people you're talking with. Acknowledging, in other words, that women have as much right to be in the workplace as men, rather than treating their actions as somehow foreign or alien to the "acceptable" male norms.

I mean, your simple and straightforward logic is the logic that four-year-old boys use when they want to punch girls on the playground and don't feel like being courteous.

Some people are just huggers. As a fan of hugs I approve of people who get down to hugging quickly, though I understand why non-huggers would be squicked out by that.

If that wigs you out, I have a particular friend group for whom kissing becomes a thing almost immediately after they've met you. The first time it happens it can be absurdly disorienting.

What Twitter is awful at – awful – is ensuring you see content from people who don't update frequently. RSS is valuable not for following content gluttons like Hacker News, but for following blogs by people who update only once every three months, or even more rarely.

News gluttonry never needed RSS anyway – generally you only need one source of neverending news as-is. RSS is for more selective reading, and its advantage lies in how it gives equal weight to people who don't publish often as it gives to people who post 50 new entries a day.

Of course you can. Don't be daft.

There are plenty of advantages to relative sizing, and in general it's a good policy, but there are many excellently-designed web sites whose sizes are absolute – just as there are many shit designs that're responsive as hell.

That was my bad. I accidentally doubleposted a comment, and deleted one of the clones.

You're reading too much into his retirement. He gives a perfectly good explanation why he quit within the speech:

Drawing comic strips for five years without pay drove home the point that the fun of cartooning wasn't in the money; it was in the work. This turned out to be an important realization when my break finally came.

Like many people, I found that what I was chasing wasn't what I caught. I've wanted to be a cartoonist since I was old enough to read cartoons, and I never really thought about cartoons as being a business. It never occurred to me that a comic strip I created would be at the mercy of a bloodsucking corporate parasite called a syndicate, and that I'd be faced with countless ethical decisions masquerading as simple business decisions.

To make a business decision, you don't need much philosophy; all you need is greed, and maybe a little knowledge of how the game works.

As my comic strip became popular, the pressure to capitalize on that popularity increased to the point where I was spending almost as much time screaming at executives as drawing. Cartoon merchandising is a $12 billion dollar a year industry and the syndicate understandably wanted a piece of that pie. But the more I though about what they wanted to do with my creation, the more inconsistent it seemed with the reasons I draw cartoons.

Selling out is usually more a matter of buying in. Sell out, and you're really buying into someone else's system of values, rules and rewards.

The so-called "opportunity" I faced would have meant giving up my individual voice for that of a money-grubbing corporation. It would have meant my purpose in writing was to sell things, not say things. My pride in craft would be sacrificed to the efficiency of mass production and the work of assistants. Authorship would become committee decision. Creativity would become work for pay. Art would turn into commerce. In short, money was supposed to supply all the meaning I'd need.

What the syndicate wanted to do, in other words, was turn my comic strip into everything calculated, empty and robotic that I hated about my old job. They would turn my characters into television hucksters and T-shirt sloganeers and deprive me of characters that actually expressed my own thoughts.

On those terms, I found the offer easy to refuse. Unfortunately, the syndicate also found my refusal easy to refuse, and we've been fighting for over three years now. Such is American business, I guess, where the desire for obscene profit mutes any discussion of conscience.

It's strange to hear an argument for not selling out in an age where plenty of artists, even some of the most talented ones, have shrugged and accepted that being a sell-out is the quickest way to go about making money for doing what you love. I wonder if Watterson was simply old-fashioned, or if he noticed something that nowadays we're less capable of noticing.

Ultimately, Steve Jobs had an insight into what computers could be, how technology could work, that was not only powerful but that Apple worked to execute throughout the entire stack of its product. From industrial design to operating system to software, his vision infused Apple's products in a way that very few other computer manufacturers have seen. Even now, as "well-designed products" are becoming a popular thing – due, in no small part, to Apple's influence – it is difficult to find products that are as thoroughly, nit-pickingly well-thought-out as Apple's stuff.

Back when nobody had much of a reason to believe in Steve Jobs and his vision, his tyrannical style was what got teams working outrageous hours, sacrificing personal lives, and shipping products that all sane people were convinced couldn't be done. So at a key moment in Apple's history, he provided a push that brought the company great success.

Very few people have that sort of all-pervasive vision; most of the people who think they do are deluding themselves. Most of the time you don't need an asshole on top driving things. Heck, it's possible that even Steve didn't have to be an asshole, that his dickish personality was just a shortcut he used to get things done conveniently.

Plenty of brilliant people have unpleasant or antisocial personalities. Sometimes it's because that's what it takes to make people who don't share your vision do what they're told. Sometimes it's because brilliant people are human too, and as flawed as any of us. Usually it's somewhere in between.

You assert that text books are no different from novels? That's absurd.

(If your assertion is that text books are, in fact, art, then I agree with you. But they're a very different sort of art from the sort that _why was creating – starting from the fact that the Poignant Guide is a work of fiction, and most textbooks are not.)

Where was the IF game within _why's spool?

Sure. You're not wrong.

I'm not a programmer. I'm barely even a member of this community. You're far more involved in this world than I am; you know names and see projects that never cross my path. My understanding of your world is shallow. I wouldn't blame that on the community, actually; that's all my fault. :-)

Let me argue from a different, slightly better-thought-out angle. It's not that no programmers do artistic things. Indeed, there are fascinating people using code pretty much everywhere, and there have been for decades. What made _why unique was that many of his projects were aimed at introducing new people to programming, in a plethora of different ways which felt more organic and intimate than your average "learn to code" resource. Codecademy, which enjoyed a tremendous success over the last year, struck me as a slightly less whimsical version of _why's TryRuby, which always struck me as particularly ingenious.

Plenty of interesting programmers don't concern themselves much with reading out to amateurs, whereas _why had the (Poignant) Guide and TryRuby and Shoes. And _why wrote, not just about the code itself, but about the culture; some of the most interesting parts of the (Poignant) Guide concerned not the Ruby language, but the Ruby culture, which he made out to be particularly enthusiastic and welcoming. (While he was a member of the community, he did a fantastic job of encouraging young idiots like myself; I received an email from him 5 years ago while I hated my environment and what I was doing and it helped me out tremendously.)

It seemed, and still seems now, like he was making an incredible effort to reach out to a sort of person that normally was turned off by the way programming worked, and convince them to give programming a try anyway. At the same time, the things he said which were critical about the community rang true with those of us who didn't feel like proper parts of it – I, as I've already admitted, am not really a programmer and my approaches to building things tend to run contrary to how most programmers work. Yet with him, and with people who were especially inspired by his work, my way of doing things has felt like a valid and worthwhile approach to making things, and I've been able to feel like a bit more part of a community because of it.

I wish there were more people like _why doing that. The programming world still feels like a cold and forbidding place to those of us who aren't already within it. It's a shame that it feels that way. I don't think that it has to be.

It would. I wasn't expecting this thread to turn as heated as it abruptly became, or I'd have thought my words out more carefully. Forgive my sloppiness?

Let me add to my other comment: I apologize if what I said came out dismissive of the many, many great programmers that do good work and help form the community. I was trying to provide context for why _why strikes such a chord within some people, rather than argue that everybody should feel about _why the same way that his biggest fans do.

It was genuinely not my intention to rustle any jimmies, and I am sorry that my comment provoked you so.

Got that out of your system, buddy?

"Our modern software community", referring to the current generation of the software community, obviously doesn't refer to the whole generation of people who existed and did good work before _why entered the scene. Clearly Ada Lovelace and _why were far from contemporaries.

You are reading something into what I wrote that isn't actually there. It's nice that you're as passionate about this as you are, and it's a good thing to be passionate about, but I do think you're misreading what I wrote, and getting terribly upset about it in the process.

What would be the point of creating something and then faking its age? Is it a test, for us to ignore empirical evidence and determine that God made it anyway? Or are you suggesting that, perhaps, the world began with us humans, and that the universe pre-humanity was manufactured to seem like it gave rise to is (but it couldn't have, because it started with us)?

I'm interested in where such a belief comes from.

Curious! I can't say I agree with that – at least, not the way you just phrased it; could just be linguistic ambiguity – but it's interesting nonetheless. I have to say, that's a mindset I don't usually expect on Hacker News; now I'm wondering just how diverse the beliefset of this community is.

Let me modify the OP's comment, Jacques: _why was one of the first people to create art around and about our modern software community.

There are a variety of cultures surrounding coding which, while somewhat diverse, still feel like somewhat of an echo chamber. You have the coding-for-startups culture, for one, and then you have people who are very invested in coding efficiency for the sake of coding efficiency. Both of these are healthy things to have exist, but they lead to a few very specific personality types dominating the landscape, and the result is that programming can seem very forbidding to people who don't match those sorts of identity. Heck, it can be forbidding to people who do match them. And you have little clusters of hobbyists here and there, but those clusters are easily overlooked by people who aren't searching for them.

The message I felt _why delivered with his work more than anything was that programming is fundamentally about more than code, or even about building. He tried to capture the emotions behind programming, the joy of learning to speak logic-driven languages, the humanity behind the hobby. And that humanity wasn't just bubbling whimsy and childlike wonder, though certainly _why dabbled in his fair share of that. There was a whole lot of insecurity, fear, worry that he might be throwing his life away on something impermanent and... not frivolous, because frivolity suggests a joy... neurotic, perhaps. Something that ultimately was consuming his time for no good purpose other than that he was locked into a pattern and couldn't see beyond it.

As somebody who's not a programmer, not even really a designer, that message struck me hard and deep, and _why sure seemed like the only person getting it out there in any big way – at least sometimes. In every other creative community I'm tangentially a part of, that dark pit of uncertainty tends to play a big role, not only in shaping the culture, but in shaping the creative direction of the medium. Musicians ask themselves whether the music they're playing is pointless, or whether the way they're making music is somehow harmful or runs contrary to the feelings they're trying to evoke. The result is that music changes. Directors ask all sorts of questions about how film should be made, how much a shot should be composed or "designed". Actors have a bevy of debates about artifice or insincerity in their roles. And writers... well, writers are about as fucked-up a category of people as they come, to the extent that the nicest and friendliest writers will cheerfully talk about how their entire life's work is probably futile and pointless.

_why wasn't a very good programmer, from what I hear, but his messiness was anathema to the kinds of cultures I usually associate with programming. He played games, and worried out loud, and made it seem like the secret to everything he did was that combination of caring/not caring that he was constantly oscillating between. The first thing that struck me about this print spool was how much it felt like a maturation of his message: not quite as whimsical, but silly in more nuanced ways, and more on-target serious about things he felt bothered by without feeling as impulsive as some of the things he wrote earlier. I love his Guide to Ruby, but there's certainly a bit of a mood-swinginess to it that this lacks.

First artist to work with software, or to comment on software? Hell no. But he felt, at times, like he was the only artist within this makeshift community that was really talking about how it felt, how it worked, what was so frustrating or nerve-wracking about it. That's why, I think, so many people treat _why like he was something special. It's probably also why so many other people don't get his appeal at all: for them, the culture that exists is exactly the one they want, and they find it irritating (if nothing else) that this "jester" was prancing about talking about non-relevant things.

I'm curious. What does "something of a creationist" entail? Is this a Deist sort of creationism, or are you closer to biblical literalism?

Out of curiosity, what's the difference between this and forums which have many ultraspecific subsections for people to discuss their personal interests? Is it that this searches for people who have as many overlapping interests with you as possible?

That is the stupidest goddamn description of religion I've ever heard. "[B]elieving without asking any questions" is literally the exact opposite of the concept of faith, which in every religion I know of requires believers to confront their own beliefs with frequent doubt. Faith is meant to put you in a frequent state of crisis in which you reexamine what you think you believe, in order to find something truer and more real.

Some of the brightest scientists I know are Christian, and absolutely they use the same methodology to investigate their faith as they do to investigate their work. It took me a little while to realize that, as an atheist, every criticism of their religion I'd come up with to bother them was a criticism they'd been grappling with for about twice as long. There are fanatics and idiots, sure, but assuming those idiots are at the center of every major religion is giving far too much credits to loudmouthed assholes and their blather.

There's a difference between the whimsical, the surreal, the colorful as a method of misleading or distracting or revealing things which cannot be said more directly, and pretension.

Feel free to think that your own criticisms of this work stem from some objective place wherein your appraisal is accurate and valid, but it seems there are members of this community also weathered in art and art criticism who think this is a valid, provocative, even moving body of writing.

Not gonna downvote you, but that's a very glib reading of what, for me, was at times a melancholy and dark piece of writing. The silliness is there, in part, to make more palatable a story about loneliness, alienation, and fear of separation from others.

_why was highly critical, even before he disappeared, of the "programmer mentality" that's incubated and fostered by sites like Hacker News itself. He was worried that something with such potential for fun, for creativity, for exploration, was being turned into something incredibly mechanized and efficient and even brutal. His "Poignant" Guide was just another way of exploring that.