DanielBMarkham

If you'll forgive me from going meta, and this is not related to Thomas's comment at all, I was interested in all of the controversial opinions that have appeared in op-eds over the years, so I did some online searching. I had remembered that the NYT gave space to Castro, to Putin, to Mao (I think), even to some asshole who wanted pederastry to be legal.

Good luck finding that. It's as if controversial opinion columns didn't exist before 2018. I couldn't even find an article with a list.

Our panopticon falters. Help me Landru! (Obligatory ST TOS reference, The Return Of The Archons)

Sullivan is on some kind of weird double secret probation and quite unhappy about it.

I do not understand the comment about his not having credibility to burn. Opinion columnists aren't jockeying to run for class president. They're supposed to take various opinions in order for ideas to be more fully fleshed out.

If the only purpose of the opinion section is to say things that reflect well on you or cover you in glory, we can pretty much skip the entire exercise and just lay-off all these people right now.

It's odd, and I don't direct this at you, but for some crazy reason people think that they should like all of the opinions that various press outlets run. I wonder if they have any idea the various opinions places like the NYTs have allowed folks to express, and quite rightly, too. When I have to like or agree with an opinion columnist, I'm missing something about where the value in the transaction is. I already know what I like and believe in. I don't need to read it over and over again.

I think with the current style of coding, that doesn't surprise me. Most all of the testing we're doing in code is because we're writing code in far too complex a manner for the value (if any) it is providing.

But that's a tough thing to explain to a person that doesn't know any better. We're teaching coding as if it were a stand-alone thing instead of simply a tool to get us other things we want.

You always test before you write any code. That's the only way to make sure the code does what it is supposed to do.

And that's exactly what good startups do, they do business tests before they write any code. Don't write code at all unless it's providing value to the customers or helping you learn something you need to know to provide value to the customers.

Now that this is taken care of, we come to the problem of the code itself. Each bit of structure you add, whether it's a line of code or a database field on a table, is a bit of infrastructure you may have to maintain, possibly forever.

Some folks want to take their eye off the business tests and move directly to system tests, testing and then coding to make sure everybody can easily understand and maintain any code that's written.

Most startups fail because they never ever got the business tests working right. They either never got around to creating them and making them pass or they came up with something that worked but were unable to flywheel it or lost the plot somewhere. Some startups have almost-perfect code that nobody wants; that's actually one of the most common way of failing.

So the natural state of affairs is to always be experiencing some kind of stress between value discovery and code quality. Personally I believe you solve a lot of this by changing the way you code and the way you look at coding, but there's too much to go into here. The key thing for most programmers to remember is that if you're dying of thirst in a desert, you're not going to care very much if the guy selling glasses of water has glasses that leak or water that's muddy. The value proposition always comes before anything else.

I agree.

You can have a series of these things over a few decades and then suddenly end up in a much different spot than when you started out. Humans have done this before. More than once. In fact, it's probably the natural outcome of situations like this and requires some sort of strong provisions to keep it from naturally happening over and over again. It's not like any of this is new.

A lot of people seem hell-bent that this is not the case, however. I'm curious to see if they're able to look at their own actions from just a small remove. If so, why? If not, why? These are technical, UX questions. They might involve sensitive matters, but that's only the more important reason for working them out.

All UI/UX issues shouldn't be about some version of wringing another .4% of sign-ups out of the funnel. There are things that are more important by orders of magnitude.

I am going to try to say something neutral, not related to current politics. Frankly, I'm doing so because I'm curious if such a comment is even possible.

- I applaud anybody who takes a moral stand, especially if it might cost them something they hold dear.

- Whenever people complain about social media, the usual response is "But these are private properties. People can do what they like with them." I agree that this is the role of private property

- It's a fact that these social media networks operate because of the network principle, that is, it's much easier to get into than to get out of. It's also a fact that just a few media sites control the vast majority of online conversation and commerce

- Might it not have been useful for this moral stance to have been taken much earlier? First, you made your money and built your company. Walking off now isn't exactly standing in the soup line next week. Second, lots of folks are stuck with your product that might now be changing its operating parameters. Third, there's no way to predict what future event might cause even more changes.

Once again, kudos for reaching inside and doing a gut check. Life is full of a bunch of people, all with different opinions and points where they would change their mind. That's a good thing, but is this just something that keeps getting more and more restrictive over time? If so, might want to put that on your sign-up page, perhaps periodically remind folks. (This is a rhetorical question aimed at every service that does what reddit does online)

The entire CV-19 episode is going to prove to be a master class in critical thinking skills. I think there's a great book in there somewhere. This is a story of common wisdom and normal channels continuing to get it wrong. (and then the eventual correction occurs)

With HCQ, there are multiple layers of noise to disentangle. Best I've got, and I've been watching this for months, is that HCQ and antivirals, in general are somewhat useful before you get infected or extremely early in the infection. They don't cure anything and nobody expected them to. They're also not appropriate to give to people by the time they show up to the hospital. By then it's too late.

That's general advice that has nothing to do with CV-19. It might be relevant that some of these drugs have been around for over 100 years and while not mundane and harmless, they have well-known safety profiles. (Other drugs that might be included in this group would be Tamiflu, or Acyclovir)

So that's the general advice you might get a year ago if you went out with a doctor and had a couple of beers. As you know, however, the HCQ thing especially got severely political. Suddenly we were seeing studies where doctors gave large doses to ICU patients, and implemented a lot of other protocols that made no sense, probably ended up hurting people, but made for good headlines.

As an outsider, there seemed to be a sort of "competition" in some parts of the academic community to come up with various papers that could technically be called scientific, but existed much more as a publicity vehicle. I could easily count a couple of dozen studies, on various topics, that were not of a high quality. I imagine there are all sorts of reasons for that.

Now we're reaching the apex of this small deviation in the mainstream of scientific research. We've got tons of data of dubious provenance being distributed to various studies to say things we're already primed to hear. It was only because a lot of people took the time to call bullshit that this was caught. Congrats to the folks that did that work.

I have no opinion about any of these drugs, but that's my evaluation of the technical quality of the discussion in the area you bring up. I think the it will eventually will all work out, and it's going to make a hell of a story to tell. But we've got a ways to go yet for all of the systems involved to adapt as they need to. We've made great progress. In many ways, CV-19 was not the pandemic everybody was expecting, and it was quite difficult for many organizations to change gears as quickly as required.

"...Or to put it another way: cell phone cameras have gotten good enough that they will do 90% to 95% of everything that the average person would ever want out of a camera. ..."

I've been a photographer my entire life. I love the hobby. Over the last few years, I've been thinking a lot about this also. I have the latest Pixel. I also have a couple of DSLRs and a few lenses. Recently I bought the best point-and-shoot you can buy. From the reviews, I was promised great things about it.

Result? Meh.

The phones and mirrorless DLSRs are not bad cameras. Both have reached the point where I'd guess they'd do about 80% of what I would do, and that's pretty cool. It's especially handy if I'm in a hurry and just want to bang out a few shots to send or post somewhere.

The problem is that last 20%. My time is not free. Usually if I'm going out to shoot some, I want to shoot some. That is, I want full control over the light bucket, a great bucket, and I'm taking time to get shots that might turn out well when I get into post-processing. These higher-tech cameras take pretty cool shots all of the time, but they're just guessing as to what might make a good shot, and they have built-in limits. So if I'm taking an afternoon to shoot, I'm taking my DSLR.

Oddly, the newer mirrorless camera has been the most disappointing, probably because I had such high hopes. It's great tech, it's just not a professional part of a photography workflow. Once I stopped thinking I could take pro pictures with it, it got more fun. But now whenever I'm using it I wonder why I'm not just going with the cell phone.

"Is this really the best we can do in 2020? How are other fields conveying complex abstract notions and ideas?"

Shameless plug: it's been on my mind for a while as well. I'm writing a book on this that has (I believe) several novel insights.

There's far too much to cover in an HN essay, but perhaps my best response is that your idea of working backwards from machine code to thought is a mistaken paradigm. There's no translation or mapping, at least not in the sense that coders like to think. That's one of many fallacies we've ran into on our journey over the last several decades to write better and more useful code.

Let us suppose a world where there are 17 computer programs we need.

apt-get is one of them.

Great program! It has done the job we've needed for decades!

Millions of people are happy. Is there an ethical reason that should change?

Everybody who uses Facebook should spend about ten minutes on it. Catch up with the important things friends are doing and leave.

Unfortunately, this behavior is not in Facebook's best interest. For them, it's Facebook now, Facebook later, Facebook as far as the eye can see. Everything is Facebook.

There is a premise to this article that needs to be called out and expunged. I have come to the sad conclusion that Facebook is a company that should not exist. It's laying waste to huge sections of the economy that used to provide valuable, informative content, it's in a battle to suck your entire day away from you with streaming and other services, and it's premise is in direct contradiction to how we know societies evolve. You can't start with "how do we fix it" and end up anywhere good.

They're not dummies. There might be a lot of happy-talk, echo chamber discussions happening inside the company, but they know the score. That's why they're picking political winners and losers. I imagine there's a ton of money heading out to both parties to provide cover over the next few election cycles.

I think looking back, if we manage to navigate our way through this period, it's going to be viewed as a very sad and dark time, much like the dark ages. I sincerely hope I am completely wrong about all of this.

Sort of a whirlwind tour of all the misconceptions the average dev might have about agile/scrum.

Yet again, here goes.

- The problem here is dogmatism, both yours and whoever is "doing scrum" to you. There is no Scotsman! He ran away. That is, it's only if you're insisting whether you're doing it right or wrong can you start to have the conversation about what is right or wrong. Your premise is invalid.

- Confusion over terms. These things are much better represented mentally by the image of a bookstore. You arrive at a bookstore and want to read up on some stuff related to teams and planning. Cool! There's a scrum section, just next to the agile section. Guess what? The books don't all agree with one another, and that's fine. It's a marketing term, a place to go for ideas.

It gets worse after that, with dysfunctions of estimating and so forth, but you start out with your head in the wrong place, whether you love X or hate X, it's not going to end well. Do stuff you like, make stuff people want, and get stuff done. If that's not working for you, here's some titles of sections in the bookstore where you might want to read some other stuff. There are other sections. If you find some sections that have cool stuff, let me know. I might could learn some neat stuff I might use one day.

That's it. It's nothing more complicated than that. You can go to those sections and learn a whole bunch of stuff about various problems you might have. Try some if you like. Or not. What you can't do is go to that section and pull some book out as if it were a recipe and then "implement" it on a team or organization. It doesn't work like that, and it's never going to work like that, whether your view is from the top or bottom of an org. You're doing it backwards. It hurts when you do that? Ok. So stop doing it that way.

As a layman observer of the scientific debate, the Vitamin D guys have been quite persistent about the correlation between Vitamin D levels and deaths. Is there causality? Beats me. The best I've heard by way of explanation is that inflammation depletes Vitamin D stores. That idea is usually followed-up with the additional theory that CV-19 causes inflammation and high platelet activity, clogging up small blood vessels and producing most of the major effects that are observed.

Profound Ignorance. The more you think you know, the less able you are to learn anything. Being profoundly ignorant doesn't reduce your ability to do anything in life, but it can be uncomfortable for both yourself and others around you. We like thinking we know things, we like hanging with people who know things, whether anybody knows anything or not.

That was good. Thank you.

Ever go swimming in a pond? It's not like a swimming pool. In a swimming pool, the water is clear, the bottom is sound, humans are the only creatures there, and you can be somewhat assured of your safety. In a pond, you can't see very far in the water, the bottom is mucky and soft, there are all sorts of other creatures, and something bad may very well happen to you.

A swimming pool is not a natural system. It takes lots of work and diligence to keep it running, and even then, bad things happen. Fortunately, a swimming pool is a system with a mostly finite set of parameters to change and a similarly-small set of outcomes to manage.

Technology, startups, and BigCorps are natural systems. They're like the pond; they evolved over time without any one person managing any of it.

It took me a long time to realize that many things in life were like that pond when I was thinking most of the world was like a swimming pool. There's nothing wrong with diving into various ecosystems that have emerged out of human complexity. In fact, you can find pleasures there you can find nowhere else. But there are significant differences that nobody tells you about. These systems are emergent, they have tons of variables you might never encounter or understand, and they change based on the actions of thousands, perhaps millions of people, all of whom are not aware that they are, in effect, managing the system. (Even if they knew, no one person has the mental ability to manage all of that.)

I said all of that to say this: natural systems do not have your best interests in mind. You form a startup? Ok, there's a preexisting set of "ramps" you are supposed to get on: bootstrap, niche, unicorn, etc. People who see you in the startup world see you as being on one of those ramps. That is how they process your existence. Same goes for BigCorps: the rule there is to get along, not make waves, and have people think of you as energetic, competent, and friendly.

These are not necessarily bad systems, but you have to keep in mind everyday you interact with them that it is ultimately you who are responsible for your emotional and personal safety, not the system (No matter what they might say to you)

So yes, be disillusioned. It sounds like you've earned it. Then reflect, learn, heal, and engage differently. You've been through a tough experience. I wish you the best. If you're half as smart as you sound, you've got this.

I think there were two huge systemic/structural problems with Vietnam (aside from whether or not we should have even been there). First, McNamara had the wrong mental model of what war is. He thought like a GM chairman, where you want to outproduce and out-deliver a competitor, ie, that it's a numbers game. That was never ever going to work. Second, and this is even more serious, top brass at DoD never called the civilians on the fact that they had their heads stuck up their asses. Instead, oddly enough, they acted like little division chiefs in a large organization: don't make waves, get face time with the boss, make sure the TPS cover sheets are attached, and so forth. This meant that not only were we wrong, we had no system in place to learn from it. There were several new ideas that look quite effective created in the lower ranks. They were all shot down before word got out too far, though. It didn't make the rest of the system look good.

One of the things I've read from folks who know a lot about startups used to amaze me. Intelligence is not necessarily a critical factor in whether founders will be successful or not. In fact, it can be counter-indicative! The more intelligent you are, you more likely you're one of the people like the author mentions. I've also read that it's not the geniuses, necessarily, that make it. Most times it's just the slow plodders. A genius may become overly-attracted to one of their own ideas. They may stick with it too long, or they may be overly-defensive when they receive honest feedback. A plodder just keeps trudging along, happy to take whatever feedback comes their way, happy to change if needed, happy to learn from others.

I captured this concept in my first book with a phrase I call "profound ignorance". It's not just admitting you're ignorant, it's admitting you're probably ignorant about everything. And that's fine. Ignorant people don't know yet, and if they're curious, they go try to find out. Even when they do find out, they're still quite open to being wrong. They are, in fact, ignorant.

I found this had a profound impact in my programming and consulting career. Frankly, it's bad for your career and good for your life. People want to hire people that know a bunch of stuff, and to be open, honest, and curious about being profoundly ignorant is not reassuring. Other programmers many times want to play posturing games. It is, after all, part of our social programming. Ignorant people usually don't do so well in these games. But on a personal level? It was liberating. I could find whatever I wanted to and deep dive in it. Since I didn't know much of anything, I was able to talk about topics I have a ton of experience in without feeling like I had to attack or defend any pre-held opinions. It was, in fact, what I consider "growing up", both as a human and as a professional.

When we think of how much programming is skewed towards youth, we should keep in mind that most really young people have not had this growing up experience. We should wish them well and cut them a bit of slack if they're acting like we did when we were their age. After all, it's human.

It's an excellent point. Learning is not the same as science, and we need randomized trials to actually be sure of anything.

Unfortunately, in the middle of a pandemic, that's not going to happen with enough speed to prevent a lot of people dying.

The perfect can be the enemy of the good enough. We don't have to guess or learn about the mass of an electron; that's been well-established through great lab work. But not all decisions are like that. Many times the hardest decisions are those you make with incomplete and contradictory information ... and not making a decision is, in effect, making a decision. This is one of the things that's so interesting here. If it were simple yes/no, what's science and what's speculation, there wouldn't be much interesting learning or decision-making happening.

One of the most interesting parts of this press release, following it on other boards, is the immediate "We already do that. Nothing new here."

That kind of reply would immediately lead me to think it was just a useless release, but then I see people posting comments along the lines of "No, we don't do that. In fact, we have a policy against doing that because of the danger of aerosolization"

For my hacker/systems wonks, this a great example of group learning happening world wide. I imagine there are many ICUs that do this, and many that forbid it. In such an environment, releases like this aren't submarines or spam; they're recurring prompts to administrators elsewhere that they might be missing something important.

I hate to sound cold, but damn this is an interesting example of how organizations learn. One commenter asked "I wonder how many of those hospitals who forbid intubation are doing it to patients with good insurance"

For the record, as far as I know this is a horrible thing to suggest. But the overall point, that large organizations have incentives that are many times removed from the actual work being done, is a good one.

This kind of conversation facilitation across borders is what the internet was supposed to be doing. I think this is the first time I've seen it working the way we had hoped. What's especially interesting to me is that many of the signals we look for in social forums, like "this is just a spam press release", "nothing new to see", or "there's some ulterior motivation here" voting up or down, etc., are actually counter-indicators and inhibitors of overall progress.

I guess if this were the 1500s YouTube would only have us post videos that confirm that witches and heretics should be burned at the stake. Maybe it would be okay to talk about a few more crusades.

Mankind improves because systems become big, rigid, and unable to evolve. People come along and point that out, suggesting various theories about how those systems got that way, the reasons why they are wrong, and offering suggestions for improvement.

It needs to be said that 99% of the time, these people are wrong. They're emotionally ill, they don't understand the situation, they have perhaps virulent and insidious ideologies that blind them to reality. These are exactly the people you want in the public square. They teach the youth about critical thinking and how to reason about your view of the world. They let the rest of us keep an eye on them in case they get violent. Plus, many of them are just happy to yell into the void; without that, there would be a lot more violence than there would be otherwise.

But every 1% of the time, those folks are actually right. Slowly they convince the rest of us. Our species improves.

YouTube can't do this. Whatever their intentions, they are directly acting against the health of our species by creating a new orthodoxy. They have to be stopped, whether broken up, taxed, or banned. It's not that the WHO is wrong here. They're probably right. It's that YouTube is making it so that the WHO can never be wrong, ie, we can never have a public discussion about their policies. Worse still, history has shown us that when you start going down this route you are actually acting against your society's interest. People treated as if they can't think for themselves turn into a population that can't think for itself. The WHO is fine, it's YouTube that has become the real enemy to public health by doing this.

I used to think exactly the same thing. I found in my own experience that this was because I was thinking of habits in too broad of terms. The trick was thinking of very small habit changes, not huge ones.

I found this book interesting, "Tiny Habits". The author does a much better job of explaining this than I probably can.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0358003326/

(Also note that one of the common definitions of addiction is where you want to do things but cannot because of some habitual behavior. Only you can judge whether that's the case or not, but I would think that's a different type of problem than regular habits)

"Lazy" is just another way of saying that you're not doing something somebody else thinks you should be doing. Nobody is lazy at playing video games or eating a favorite food. If you like doing it, you do it. You can't be lazy. You can only be lazy in some kind of context where you or others judge you and find you wanting.

So two pieces of advice. First, stop judging so much. Do what you love doing and don't feel the least bit guilty about it. Second, find things you love doing that generally make you a better person over time and do those things. This might require trying out new things every weekend for a while. Once again, don't judge yourself; instead find things you truly love that you feel are also good for you. There are plenty of these things for everybody, and each person has his own mix. Never feel like you have to have somebody else's.

A lot of commenters here are using the mountain metaphor. I'd like to say the same thing a different way. Stop being so goal focused and instead become habit focused. You don't want to accomplish some big goal, all you want to do is do fun stuff that makes you a better person. As a result of that, you'll probably accomplish some cool goals. But you'd never do that if you started from zero and tried to guilt yourself into striving towards some goal you couldn't care less about.

Habits are easy to change. The trick is to try new things and start with really, really small changes. Most of life is Zen anyway. You either enjoy doing things and die or you suffer and die. It's your choice.

I like what I heard Tyler Cowen say a long time ago: a degree in economics is a great way to learn about a lot of ideas that sound good but don't work. (I'm paraphrasing, of course)

I thought his point was great. There's some well-trodden ground in economics. If you learn nothing more but where the alligators are, you're probably going to do a lot better on that trip through the swamp you plan on taking. If nothing else, it tends to elevate the conversation.

Making sense in what fashion, to what end? Investment opportunities? Proposed public policy changes? Where to look for a job?

To a large degree the economy is unknowable. That's why you can get two economists in a room and receive seven opinions. Don't get me wrong; there's good value there. It's just that economics is an odd mix of philosophy and math. On my more cranky days I call it astrology for people who know calculus.

If the economy were knowable to the degree that some economists claim to know it, they'd all be billionaires. So my advice is to scope down your question to something a bit more workable.

I meant nobody alive today. I guess now we could argue about smallpox, measles, and the like, but I am working from the general definition of the last pandemic being the Spanish Flu.

I have added the two missing words to my original post for clarification. Thank you.

As somebody who has been tracking and interested in this story since late January, the one thing I can without qualifications is that whatever seems true now will change in a few weeks' time.

In general the outlook has gotten better as the data got better and we were able to compare notes, although there have been some setbacks, too.

I don't think we'll ever, ever get back to "normal" as this is the pandemic we've been reading about and planning for over the last century. Nobody [alive today] has ever lived through something like this and it is bound to have lasting consequences.

But I would be cautious about reading long-term plans. I know everybody wants to know how the story ends, but people who have engaged in long-range planning over the last couple of months have consistently had to re-plan. I would expect that trend to continue. We don't know exactly what small changes might have large consequences. For instance, monitoring temperatures at points of entry and exist for all businesses could have a major effect, or forms of "frontier testing"

No doubt this is a period for the history books. We'll probably have to live through it to finally figure out how it's all going to end.

You'd think so, wouldn't you?

I have no idea what happens in general, but I can share that several experiences I've had is that the attitude is "we buy it and the vendor comes and makes it work" which, by necessity, is hands-off. Do that for enough years and you lose whatever skills you might have had to start with.

I would hope that my small experience does not represent the overall situation. I don't know. Just wanted to point out that there are side effects of the build/buy decision if you stick to it over a number of years that might not be noticed by folks outside looking in.

I'm doing it in three passes. Stage 1 is writing the book with an emphasis on rigor, sourcing, and having something interesting, unique and valuable to share that people can't find elsewhere. I'm mostly through with that. Stage 2 is making sure people can understand it, that I've explained myself well. Stage 3 will be tone, accessibility, and fun.

So I am starting with very little anecdotal/personal experience, relying on science and industry stuff, then adding more of a personal touch as I go, enough to make it enjoyable.

Hit me up if you'd like to read the first chapter or two, tell me how far along I am on these goals. My email is in my username at hotmail.com

I can see both sides of this. In some ways, this is the old "seat of your pants" vs. "plot the book out" discussion. The important thing is whatever works for you.

I've done this in various formats, including single editor, scrivener, and so forth.

I've found that the process of breaking a book up into "chunks" to be a useful one to me. If I can't chunk it, there's probably something wrong with the structure.

But hell, if what you have works for you, go for it. I'm currently using the LeanPub build system which seems to be just enough structure without getting in the way.