binspace

Heavy-handed priortization also causes less fluid thought.

I'm really glad Silicon Valley shops tend to have a playful culture. It makes it easier to fight for it where I work.

Quit Datein' on the young man.

Maybe cheating is ok. Sure, there is a reason why it's faster. Maybe the guarantee of the write to disk is not as necessary as some people would believe.

It's certainly not the same as writing to /dev/null.

Maybe the developer can have other ways of guaranteeing consistency.

Sure, you can create a massive json hash and store it in a sqldb field. However, most sqldbs that I'm aware of do not support searching that massive hash. You need to come up with index tables.

The nice thing about Mongo is you can query that hash without having to have an index table.

oh, leave the poor text area alone.

That's true. We are unable to put effective solutions into place to meet our environmental challenges.

> The "threads are bad" cargo cult has often lead people to pursue "interesting" solutions to various concurrency problems in order to avoid using threads.

I know. Redis and Memcached are definitely cargo cult programs. ;-)

Seriously though, I'm not sure if I follow why it's a cargo cult. Evented programs, as the author knows, is a way to avoid I/O blocking. Sometimes it's not the right tool for the job, however I've been pretty happy learning the evented idioms. It helped me to more clearly think about client/server and web service communication.

Maybe zealot would be more appropriate to cargo cult member?

> refusal to let private enterprise get on with making, doing, exporting, building

Agreed. However, blatant consumerism is causing massive global environmental damage. Industry & private enterprise should produce things that help society & the world, not pillage and destroy it.

Face it, the economy was on hyper-drive for too many years. We have for too long deferred paying our debts and missed making fundamental changes to our economy and society that would make our society (not just the environment) more sustainable.

Joblessness and a down economy would have happened with or without California regulations.

> The only way the energy problems are going to be solved is by letting free enterprise innovate and compete to a solution. Governments can't and shouldn't pick winners. Let any energy solution live and die on it's merits.

Exactly, that would be wonderful. Unfortunately the government has & still gives enormous subsidies to many environmentally (both sociologically and environmentally) damaging industries.

For example, why is food so cheap to mass produce in a centralized location and ship, so we can enjoy fattening and nutrient-starved meals at our local Micky D's? Government subsidies.

Why is oil so prevalent as our only energy source. Government subsidies of the auto industry. Let them go out of business so manufacturers make cars that people actually want.

Why is planned obsolescence such a mainstay in consumer goods, when more practical solutions exist? The all-mighty dollar has served as a Siren's song to the unchecked finance gambling machine.

Why do we have to spend billions of hours commuting, away from our families, when we can focus on making industries more localized and developing telecommuting technologies?

And how about the military as a vehicle of subsidization. Why are we fighting two wars based on false premises while pillaging social security?

Why is there a war on drugs? Subsidies.

I would rather have subsidies spent on encouraging more sustainable behavior, as the world population's resource usage is rapidly increasing. It just makes sense.

> while deregulating everything else

Yeah, like deregulating energy. That turned out great for California.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_electricity_crisis

I recommend Collapse by Jared Diamond and The Collapse of Complex Societies by Joseph Tainter, as a treatise over how different societies reacted to resource shortages & environmental damage.

They try to be non-political and are very informative, IMO.

There are some good points, however the emphasis needs to be on how green regulation is applied.

The article seems to be complaining about "green" regulations (which are outdated and inane), not against the idea of the necessity of sustainable technology.

One quibble, more offshore drilling will not solve the problem, and causes problems, as in the Gulf of Mexico. It's also a drop in the ocean of energy demand. It solves nothing.

You only need to look as far as global rising energy consumption (especially China) and the supply/demand curve. Basic economics. This means the sustainable energy problem needs to be solved, and what better place to solve it than in California?

We need solutions without throwing the baby out with the bathwater. For example, make it easier for entrepreneurs and relieve the tax burden to encourage businesses. Provide an environment where technology (even green technology) can thrive. Create incentives for people to adopt more environmentally friendly approaches to living, etc. I think there are plenty of examples where sustainable living & and strong economic fundamentals can coexist.

Wow, that article had government propaganda written all over it. Now I'm really glad somebody is standing up and exposing some questionable secrets.

America should be a government for the people by the people. I'm sorry, but hiding murders of children is not for the people.

I hope this leads to more transparency by the US government to it's citizens.

My god that was horrible. I was listening to music and that crap came up.

I was looking for an article, closed it in disgust when I figured out that the site was the example.

Speaking of the misuse of technology, Flash seems to have a culture of this sort of crap (remember shockwave?).

HTML 5 seems to have more of a culture of nuanced integration with the rest of the web page.

Of course the more successful usages of Flash seem to trend toward seamless integration.

> If your "novel" RoR application doesn't work, no-one cares,

Not true if you have lots of users, just ask Twitter. Fortunately, a Twitter outage does not cause massive ecological damage.

> We would need to do an experiment to verify your claims.

Unfortunately, software development productivity (and solution quality) is notoriously difficult to measure and perform experiments on. It is also expensive, time-consuming, and their conclusions tend to be shaky at best. The experiments' applicability is also heavily influenced by the uniqueness of each individual person.

Technology just moves too fast. I'm afraid anecdotal evidence is probably the best we usually can do when talking about how we work.

> It surely lowers you IQ, although it still may still be a net positive. Many brilliant people are also anxious, and can't get things done because of it. If marijuana helps you relax enough to focus, this is a win.

You hit the trade-off nail on the head. Thank you.

For me, this is especially true when putting in extra hours at home.

> "Does not really diminish my IQ"

Sorry, I meant it does not significantly diminish my IQ.

> How do you know is not the same thing with you.

First, I did not say I'm smarter when high. There was a study that shows that there is a small drop (~ 4 points) http://www.cnn.com/2005/WORLD/europe/04/22/text.iq/.

I also see my work when I am sober and it's fine.

The question is what needs to be optimized. At times (not all the time IMO and certainly not in the office), the benefit of exploring new options and increasing motivation of the task outweighs the slight drop in IQ.

> The test subjects would swear that they drive even better when drunk.

I did not swear I code better either. I take a different approach to solve the problem at hand, which leads to better results due to diversity in the problem solving process. I code sober much more often than when high. My code is also peer reviewed. It seems to work out just fine.

Sometimes you just have to loosen up. However you want to do that is up to you, as long as you use proper discretion if it is a controversial approach...

Also, try coding while high. I find it does not really diminish my IQ, it just changes the how I think. Basically, my thinking becomes more tangential, so I'm able to explore scenarios with depth. It also relaxes me and helps me to let go of certain notions create boundaries to coming up with different solutions.

Usually, when encountering such a problem, I will pace around the house exploring the line of thought.

Of course, focus can be a problem, so it's not exactly something that should be done all of the time. However, there are things that can help you to stay on task, such as having the code you are working on open.

Of course, YMMV.

As an engineer, I'm offended by the fact that some lawyer has control over the types product I can design. We keep on hearing how patents harm innovation, now hopefully something is done about it.

Those are good ways of bringing up the point.

> So there is a cultural problem there (hopefully confidence does not sway a scientific group)

Isn't this the norm though? Given all things equal, it's been my experience that people who make quick and strong judgement tend to have more control over a social situation.

Of course somebody who is wrong often will have less reputation. However, being wrong is not always bad, especially if it leads to further thought and exploration to find the truth and the person is willing to change one proven wrong.

> It is a great point that people don't qualify because it makes them sound less confident, and people that sound more confident end up being more convincing to most people.

Your qualification about reading the comparison instill confidence on the rest of the statement. Maybe it's the self-deprecating qualifications that should be avoided...

> You have to work at finding the middle road between qualifying and giving an impression of relative confidence.

True.

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Some meta thoughts. I would have to expend lots of energy and time to be able to properly qualify some of my statements. I find the time/accuracy trade-off to skew toward time, here, with the hopes that a well educated and astute crowd (such as HN commenters), can point any flaws or provide validation to my statements.

Yes you are, and you can choose to go down that path or not.

> I find better just to confidently state something, and get called out for inaccuracies (it's certainly more memorable).

Of course this is dangerous when talking to people who know less than you about something, since they may not have the ability to call you out.

To that, if you do see something wrong with something you said in the past, it is morally imperative that you correct the mistake.

> Start qualifying everything.

For some reason I find it annoying when people do that. For example I often hear something like ("I don't know but, the library you are using is bloated compared to library X").

I frequently catch myself saying "I don't know" in front of assertions I make. This is an issue when talking to a less knowledgeable person, because the "I don't know" puts the more knowledgeable person at an immediate disadvantage, and lets the person with less knowledge have more of a say in how things should be run.

I find better just to confidently state something, and get called out for inaccuracies (it's certainly more memorable). Also think about what you said at the end of the day. It's better to recognize and admit inaccuracies than to hang onto your pride (http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8...).

I prefer creating customized frameworks from libraries. I tend to know more about my particular problem than any generic framework writer.

Also, I can focus only on the solutions and features I need. I often don't have to build for the super general case, which often results in a simpler framework that helps rather than hinders.

I don't find his comments out of line and deserving a downvote. My question is what purpose do downvotes serve other than allowing frustrated readers to retaliate against a "bad" post? > a lot of my comments get upvoted when they're out-of-line with the majority Your arguments have to be better. Simply stating differing opinion and anecdotal evidence (not always invalid) will often result in a downvote. I would find it more useful if the topic were explored, rather than censored.

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Bummer, this story got censored. I think this is a good discussion. Obviously there are some unhappy people.

I wonder if there are any sites that do not have downvotes. Honestly, the lack of a downvote button really attracted me to Hacker News. It's a shame it's being liberally used.

* Sorry about the double post. I was not able to create a new post.

I suppose the downvotes in this thread is for irony's sake.

Thank you, and no worries. It's been a few days and I'm well over it.

I get the message you were trying to get across and I agree with it.

Mainly, I perceived you as being rude and disdainful (lmgtfy, "That is your conclusion?"). I can't speak for everybody, but my immediate reaction is to feel stupid, and then get defensive. It's hard to take a step back and realize how minor it is when in the moment.

I know that was not your intention. I really do appreciate you sticking this out.

Very true. Awareness over the issues that it causes is a good start. And it seems like others are becoming aware. I bet it's mostly the younger generations.