Oregon legalized marijuana on Tuesday. Microsoft open sources .NET today. They say miracles come in 3. What's next?
485 karma · joined July 7, 2014
You know how you find beer and dogs at a stadium? Go walk the concourse! Follow the smell! Flag down a vendor!
What an utter waste of time and money.
The Valley works well at convincing people that fake money is equal to the quality of real life. Market caps have nothing to do with happiness, health, and interpersonal relationships.
If you mean creating artificial wealth for a small group of already-rich folk, yes, it works. If you mean transforming one of the most naturally advantaged landscapes on earth into a traffic-choked sea of concrete where people do little more than work at creating new ways to buy and sell stuff, yes, it works. If you mean polluting what was once the most democratic communications vehicle available with social drivel and advertising, it works.
If you mean creating innovations that truly improve humanity, the Valley extremely inefficient. If you mean demonstrating that humans don't need a pleasant natural environment to survive, the Valley is on the right track.
The one thing the Valley works very well at is self-congratulation, especially among the wealthy.
We essentially owe our profession to psychedelic explorations by pioneers of software engineering. Companies who drug test developers are ignorant of this history, and are the enemies of the digital revolution.
Brilliant, beautiful languages and programs came from these pioneers, and it's likely because of their rich neural networks, enhanced by psychedelics as seen in the Wired article. The ability to connect humanistic art and feeling with symbolic systems and code requires a sophisticated neural network. Psychedelics help build the mental infrastructure for software development that actually benefits humans.
I would love to see any stats or info about the relative consumption of psychedelics- both kind and amount- among engineers at specific companies or types of software firms.
Really, really well done. I still think that Oracle has a pretty strong legal leg to stand on, unfortunately. And they have the legal team to pretty much guarantee victory. API specs deserve the same copyright protections we provide for other forms of intellectual property.
The bigger problem that needs to be confronted is the ridiculous scope and corporate bias of US copyright law, which is the ultimate root of the maladies that strangle creativity and punish artists and working engineers in this country. I believe that API specs deserve the same legal protections as song lyrics, plot devices, and poetry. But I think those legal protections, buttressed by lawyers from Disney and Oracle, have gotten out of control and now penalize the people they were supposed to protect.
40% of youth in the USA today do not even have that, and as such, have virtually no chance at all of being able to even play in the capitalist economy. They will be successful if they avoid homelessness and hunger, which will be a daily struggle.
Gates, Buffett, and others who claim to be philanthropists work from a point of ignorance, believing that all youth at least have their basic needs covered by this society. They are blind. Piketty at least acknowledges the underclasses.
These so-called philanthropists depend on the existence of a permanent underclass to support their "charity".
I was raised on the edges of this underclass and even today, after 20 years in the business doing quite well, I worry every day that I will soon be homeless or hungry. I have no inheritance to count on,other than debt from my family. The idea of taking a couple of months without income to make a startup is laughable- how would I eat and make my house payment? Most of the peers from my youth are on public assistance, in jail, ill, or worse. They are easy prey for the tech titans, who fill their eyes with glittery visions that make them forget their hunger and cold. This is in the Bay Area, mind you, less than 20 miles from the Valley.
Gates' idea of a consumption tax would heavily penalize these people, who have been enslaved into a consumer lifestyle by the wealthy who exercise control over their lives.
The whole "inequality" debate laments the demise of the middle class. But it never acknowledges the permanent underclass that is a necessary component of a society that can take the time for the inequality debate.
I got out, though you never lose the psychic clutches of abject poverty. Most folks never get out.
I studied both CS and English in college, and got my degree in English. The communication skills and translation techniques I learned as an English major have been tremendously useful to me in my career as a software engineer. In my experience hiring developers, I've found that those with liberal arts degrees do very well, particularly when they leverage their humanities background as an asset.
Anyone can write code, but it takes a breadth of knowledge and perspective to effectively maintain and engineer software that has societal value.
So alerts are pretty much a must for us, and the obnoxious interruptions help us make the regulators happy. Getting a nicer alert like this will make our customers a bit happier while still keeping us in compliance.
But our use case is of course not standard. Usually alerts are like Satan.
I'll keep my home city a secret for now- it's easy enough to find- but let's see- I make a Valley-sized salary, live in a house with a yard less than 5 miles from downtown that costs about 25% of the equivalent in the Bay Area, my office is about 10% of what Google pays, I never sit in traffic, I work on challenging problems, I can indeed barbecue 12 months out of the year (with the best beer, wine, and meat in the world) and I know a thousand other engineers all doing the same.
Any engineer or entrepreneur staying in the Valley or even SF right now should lose credibility immediately for poor business and lifestyle choice.
And what's happening to SF right now is interesting. It's becoming a suburb- but the poets are still there. Always.
You don't need to understand the whole codebase. It will take years. Best to focus on what the users need and analyze small chunks. If it's truly 100M lines, there's not going to be any semblance of consistency in the code.
You can also slap New Relic on it and you may be amazed at what you learn, right away.
Don't waste too much time trying to understand all the code. Focus on a couple issues first, make some hypothesis, and then see how well your understanding of the code fits the bigger picture. Refactor and repeat.
I wish there was a good study on mental health in aging programmers, to validate what has always been obvious from experience. We have a shelf life. This work is challenging and affects your brain chemistry if you spend your career constantly immersed in difficult programming tasks.
I must say that I do not know any programmers who have lasted into their 50's without being regular stoners. Something about cannabis seems to protect them from the dementia that is so prevalent among people in this field 20 or more years.
Relative to this article, though- even though I'm a big advocate of the herb I'm familiar with the research done in Israel, Spain, and elsewhere, and one common thread is that cannabis alters the growing brain in ways that may not be desirable. I wish we could talk to our kids intelligently about it. Whether it's legal or not, it is not a good idea for a teenager to smoke a lot of weed. One puff isn't going to kill you, but once a week might impact your brain, and give you less psychic space to explore when you get high later in life.
Patience, children!
I've always used a company's drug-testing policy as a litmus test. If they test for cannabis, I know that they are limiting their pool severely, and that they will not get a number of the best programmers.
Despite the efforts of the Valley's largest companies to "be different, think different, not be evil", etc..., they are human endeavors run by human beings subject to the same natural laws of behavior and organizational psychology as the companies they were once trying to "be different" from.
Your story is no different from the typical story of someone trying for non-trivial employment at IBM, Apple, Microsoft, the Department of Defense, or even Wal-Mart. Except, perhaps, for the free lunches- which you'll be trying to avoid after a few months anyway, unless you have given up any semblance of outside life to join The Party (or The Company).
It is proof that large tech companies, new and old, have not made the type of change that their execs and founders have always trumpeted. They are still subject to the same laws of human behavior and organizational development that affected older companies, the United States, the ancient Greeks, the Catholic Church, etc...
Given this- natural language programming can hope to achieve reasonable levels of precision in very few languages. English, for example, has over a million words, while French and Italian are both under 100K. That 10x discrepancy in words means that there is necessarily far more imprecision in romance languages than English. Graamatical constructs can add precision and clarity but cannot make up for the inherent gap in vocabulary precision.
Someone with more knowledge can comment on the feasibility of precise NLP in non-English, non-romance languages.
If, however, acceptance testing is defined through the precision of a low-level programming language, but the problem is defined in a less-precise natural language, there will always be a precision mismatch between the languages used to define the problem. A solution may be implemented that addresses the natural language issue but cannot meet the constraints of the programming language.
Developers, stop slaving away for the VC's. You are wasting your time and have no chance of getting paid until we reform the economic foundation of our trade.
When the MOOC "bubble" started, I was sort of stunned that so many schools thought that they could deliver a valid learning experience by just posting videos and syllabi online. Everyone's been doing that since 1995. MOOC was just a way to say "lots of people are watching our videos in the same sequence!" The model started breaking down quickly as soon as tracking objectives, assessing students, and interacting with instructors came into play. That's when you're into LMS territory.
LMS seems to be a bad word when you talk to MOOC advocates. Like so many buzzword people, they say that MOOC's are "disrupting" the traditional LMS.
But at the end of the day, if you're going to be successful with a MOOC, you're going to have what amounts to an LMS to deliver it. There's no magic bullet shortcut there that combines ("mashup"- another favorite buzzword for people reinventing the wheel) all the things you need to deliver a successful learning experience.
MOOC people say they're disrupting learning systems by mashing up all these things. It's a great idea- but once you actually implement, you've built an LMS.
My current client's LMS could easily, today, deliver a class to 100K students with manageable interactivity and assignments (and delivery on mobile devices), and yet the client wants to throw the thing away because it's 10 years old. Most universities who have failed with MOOC's would spend a million bucks or more to have this LMS, and the client is just going to throw it away. Wasting money seems to be the true meaning of "disrupt" in the learning context.
How about some empathy for each of those employees you are firing, who have to go home and face families and lives that they've shared with you and you have essentially shat upon?
They are not "resources". They are people, humans, and their lives and loves are just as important as yours. They shared a piece of their humanity with you to help you in your dream. A dream which, make no mistake, isn't making the world a better place. It's you yourself getting rich. You used these people and now they have to deal with their lessons learned.
Which aren't "lying is a bad thing" and "not paying taxes is bad" and "I need to network more with rich people." They are- "I need to find a new job and/or draw unemployment, I need to cope with this shock to my system, and I need to figure out how I'm going to pay the bills".
All the "libertarians" in this business lose sight of social agreements and safety nets, until they get screwed by someone who shares that approach.
Javascript is designed from the ground up to enable bad developers to write shitty code. It's fine for alpha work, terrible for production.
It is possible to write beautiful, elegant, maintainable Javascript- but I've never seen a "designer" or even a "JavaScript programmer" write code like that. I have a job as a code mechanic because so many companies are built on woeful Javascript.