My Other Car Decapitates Lists

I decided I should probably give it a rest with the puns in the article titles.  A literary allusion is a nice title, though.  We do things with class around here, shitheads!

But on to the content.  As you may have gathered from my many posts which either center on Hacker News or mention it in passing, I am a big fan of the site.  During my usual meanderings and daydreamings about how awesome a pet dinosaur* would be and why it might not be too late for me to become an astronaut, I devoted some time to thinking about why I liked it so much.  It is, in case you are foolish enough to never click the orange text when reading my missives, a site run by Paul Graham concerning startups and other variegated things hackers like.  It began as a sort of offshoot of the Y Combinator startup program, which allots small investments to promising startups in batch mode every summer and winter, both in Boston and San Franciso, respectively.  Paul runs this as well, and has made a point to let people interested in funding know that registration on Hacker News is mandatory, and indeed, the quality of your comments and contributions has a direct effect on whether or not you will be funded.

This revelation has created an interesting culture, one that I wish existed in more places on the web, and that I will discuss in depth in a minute.  However, 99% of the forums online have no real interest in authentication of the poster's identity.  In fact, most forums rather expect you to come up with a username to protect your real identity.  But why? 

The most common answer is protection from identity theft.  But these days, what can someone do with just your name?  Track you down?  Unless you have a very uncommon name, it seems unlikely.  There are probably hundreds of Sean Spencers out there;** can someone really find my physical location without sifting through all these?  And why would they want to, unless I pissed someone off?

And here we come to a well-established point:  the internet + anonymity makes you an asshole.  When their is no penalty to your reputation for being a jackass (since no one can connect up your online username with your real name), people will just degenerate into stupid, vicious animals.

This is the difference between the discussions on Hacker News and those elsewhere.  Due to most posters on Hacker News having an established identity (many posters use their real names, like myself), the discussion quality is incredible.  People are literally climbing over each other to submit interesting stories and write insightful commentary.  This is why Hacker News is now my homepage, and why I wish more sites would adopt a similar policy of authentic identities.

* I am thinking maybe a stegosaurus.  I mean, I would need a bigger yard, but nothing beats riding around on a stegosaurus. 

** Lots of athletes, it seems.  If you find an athletic Sean Spencer online, it is a very safe bet that it isn't me.

Wait, that's AIDS.  Never mind.  Though annoying, ads are generally pretty harmless.  While reading Hacker News a while ago I began thinking about whether ads should exist on this stupid blog.  After several cups of coffee and some wasted thought imagining Scarlett Johansson nude, I finally came up with a solution:  targeted ads.  Enter Adpinion, an interesting idea with excellent implementation.

I like to support startups whenever possible, and the idea of Adpinion is worth supporting.  The basis of this innovation is that ads work best when they involve something a person cares about.  Tailoring ads to individual viewers is difficult for a site without cookies, but Adpinion not only allows me to see what various visitors of my site like, but also allows repeat visitors to view more relevant ads.

So how does this magical mystery work?  Adpinion uses a very simple and tried-and-true method:  voting.  If it serves an ad you dislike, click the thumbs down.  The ad will disappear until the page is refreshed and the site serves a new ad for you to vote on.  If you like the ad, click the thumbs up.  You'll see more like it in the future.

I decided to apply for a beta invitation, got it a few weeks later, and decided to try it out last week.  It will be interesting to see what (if anything) people vote up and down.

And I just put that picture of Scarlett up there to aid in my ruminations of her nude body while I wrote this. 

For the few people actually reading this goofy crap (Hi Mom) I decided to write down some of what I have been thinking about the Kindle, which every other blogger on the planet seems to be pissing themselves in either spasmodic glee or rage about.

Frequent readers (or people who, you know, actually KNOW me) are aware of the fact that I read books like they are going out of style.  I took four* books out of the library here on Saturday and I am done with two.**  And it was a busy weekend without much time to read.  Though I am a well known skimmer, I truly love reading books.

I also like programming.  And technology, and computers, and all kinds of things other programmers and technophiles enjoy.  This includes little gadgety handheld things, though I rarely buy them.  I actually only own an iPod due to my clumsy attempts to flirt with the girl selling raffle tickets leading me to buying a ticket with my coffee money for that day.

This combination of the love of gadgets and books ought to make me uniquely biased towards the Kindle, but you know what?  I seriously could care less about the thing.  While it has some features that I like (E-Ink, the ability to read non-Amazon text files easily), it also has a slew of features that piss me off to no end.

1)  It looks fugly.  Yeah, yeah, looks don't matter, only functionality.  Grow up.  If it looks like asshole, I don't want my hands on it.

2)  DRM.  Wait, what?  You mean I can't lend other people my Amazon  eBooks bought through my Kindle?  Well fuck you too, Bezos.  If you are so petrified of BOOK PIRACY(!) then just build in a month-long time limit before the book I lent to my friend evaporates from my friend's Kindle. 

3)  Orwell's worst nightmare comes true.  Peruse this chilling passage from the Kindle's Terms of Service:

The Device Software will provide Amazon with data about your Device and its interaction with the Service (such as available memory, up-time, log files and signal strength) and information related to the content on your Device and your use of it (such as automatic bookmarking of the last page read and content deletions from the Device). Annotations, bookmarks, notes, highlights, or similar markings you make in your Device are backed up through the Service.  - Amazon, Kindle Terms of Service.

Publishers' marketing research must just be tossing Bezo's salad all night long over that one.  Nothing like intensely close scrutiny of one's reading habits!  It's bad enough that Amazon itself tracks so much information when people use its site, but tracking such things as bookmarks and deletions is completely intolerable.  I can see it sending out police patrols to arrest me for pedophilia after reading Lolita one too many times. 

So, needless to say, I will be passing on this loathsome hunk of shit.  However, OLPC has your back for all your nerd holiday shopping needs.  The XO is on sale through the 31st of December!  Now THERE is something that should be setting the blogosphere*** aflame, but everyone is too busy jerking off all over the Kindle.




*  Rainbow's End by Vernor Vinge, A Fire Upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge, The Confusion by Neal Stephenson, and Atonement by Ian McEwan in case anyone cares.

** Both Vinge books.  I hope he keeps writing; his space operas are amazing in depth and vision, and the postcyberpunk stuff like Rainbow's End is equally excellent.

*** Kill me now.

Bird, bird, bird; bird is the word.

I am taking today off to eat a shitload of turkey and drink gin until football becomes entertaining.






Normal (that is to say, semirandom) updates resume tomorrow.

Cory Doctorow has an interesting article he posted while cruising about high above the earth in his blogosphere about an immune system for the internets.  He brings up some curious points about how difficult it is to unfuck the immune system once it thinks something fishy is going on, and then goes on to compare the immune system's issues with how dangerously hard it is to get a computer system to acknowledge that you are in fact harmless once it identifies you as a threat.  This metaphor of the internet as a body with an immune system made me think of the other implications contained therein.

Doctorow suggests that perhaps something should be done to automate the unfucking of these systems.  For example, he recalls staying at a hotel whose network decided his laptop's frequent pings towards other hosts on the network were the start of some malicious port-scanning, when in fact it was just a game he was playing on his laptop's attempts to find other hosts to play with.  If only he could hit a reset button to restore internet access to his hotel room as easily as he tripped the "DANGER HAXX!" tripwire!

Well, why can't he?  Just like we have sophisticated immune systems built over time, we could rig networks with sophisticated immune systems built from experience.  Why not have multiple layers of defense, with incremental response?  Instead of just hosing anything looking for hosts, the hotel might consider this a step to future hosing.  First, is the offender checking many ports all over?  Yes.  Branch down MULTPORTS path of the decision tree.  Instead of cutting access here, seek to understand what the program is doing.  Check the packet payload.  Hmm, its structure looks similar to another branch of the tree, GAMEPACKET.  Use Bayesian filtering to decide that it either is or isn't a game packet.  If it is, let it go about its merry way.  If it isn't, seek other possible intents that match the packet.  If none are found, kill the program.  If it is legit, the man in the hotel room will call up and complain, and you can add another layer to your filter. 

This sort of ad-hoc system for determining intent would interesting to implement.  Perhaps it would find too many false positives to be useful, but it is interesting to think of the ups and downs of an internet immune system, and why it is worth attempting to fix it or not.

A VC blog I chanced upon a while ago contained this lovely epithet, which was a source of some consternation for one of the bloggers who felt that this phrase (used as an appraisal of the VC scene in NY) was too harsh.

And yet I can't help but think that it may be an apt description for the startup scene in Boston.  My comrade Mr. John Watson wrote me an email yesterday with this content:

    Were I in 'Frisco, I'd attend stupid shit like this: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=5907866589&ref=mf     People say that Boston is a startup & technology hub.  What     am I missing?  Is there initiative that needs taking?

After some thought, we decided we were right.  There was initiative to be taken.  And who better than some idiots who want to start a startup?

So I put it you, loyal MOCDL readers (all 2 of you).  What should we Bostonians do?  Who would be fun to invite to speak?  Or would we be better off with just a meet and greet at a cool location?

During my final few months at UNH, I have been taking a class by the name of "History of the Modern World" which UNH, in its infinite wisdom, decreed I should take to make sure I don't come out of college completely ignorant of the past.  On the surface, it is an entry-level history major class; however, lurking beneath the surface is its true function, at least in my eyes:  showcase of the stupidity of UNH students.

Now let's get some stuff clear.  I'm going to berate two groups of people here:  UNH students and history majors.  I love history:  it is one of my favorite things to read about.  I hate history majors:  they are lumped in with pysch majors and communications majors in a group I like to call "My Future Cashiers".  UNH is a decent enough state school, which I ended up at after a year at WPI completely wiped out my savings.*  I like UNH:  clean, quiet campus.  Wonderful professors (in CS, anyway).  And above all:  cheap. 

However, because it is a state school, it often reminds me more of a high school than a university.  The amount of popped collars exceeds the physical number of people on campus.**  The goal of most of these kids seems to be nothing more than to get laid, with alcohol a close second.  These are fine pursuits to be sure, but when your hung over ass almost throws up on me while I try to dodge your stumbling attempt to cross the street at 9 am on a Wednesday, I may grow a little irked at your dedication to your craft.

However, I have mostly high-level CS courses, notably devoid of this stereotype.  The only gen ed I take this semester is the aforementioned history class, which is full to the brim of people that remind me of high school, and why it fucking sucked.  One kid in particular's insistence that Communism worked perfectly really took the life out of me today.  It seems like everyone has this kid in history class at some time in their life:  fat, strident, ill-washed, and smugly sure of his superiority over the rest of these sheep who think capitalism is the bee's knees.  His stained Che shirt, which he wears without a trace of irony (slightly distorted by his massive gut), is as much a symbol of his stupidity as it is any resistance against The Man.

Now, I remember in WPI this kind of kid existed as well.  For some reason, I took a Shakespeare class there, and a version of this blob manifested himself in that classroom as well, often loudly opining that we were idiots and dolts beyond measure for thinking that Shakespeare existed.  He was OBVIOUSLY a group of different authors working as a collective!***

The difference at WPI is that the professor fucking called him out, asking for evidence that that was true, and citing his own opinion that Shakespeare was quite real with well-reasoned arguments.  Clue entire class chuckling at cookie-cutter nonconformist getting owned. 

But at UNH, this never happens.  The professor thanks him for his valuable contribution, and I groan and slouch down in my chair.  Is this worth it?  What the hell am I getting out of this exchange?  Truth be told, I spend the vast majority of time in that class thinking about startups.  They hold more interest for me these days than anything UNH has to offer.




*  Thank you, three consecutive tuition hikes over the course of one year!  You made my already 40K a year education completely unattainable!

**  Seen crossing commuter parking lot:  A kid with no less than three popped collars:  two shirts, one fashionably rumpled black blazer.  And a tan no one in New England could ever have.

*** Cue lecture on the uses of collectivism, with frequent interjections about how much he wishes he could suck Lenin's preserved dick.  Or maybe I'm just reading between the lines there.

I kid.  Some of my best friends are Germans!*

Weitz is mostly cool because of cl-who and hunchentoot.  As I have let slip before whilst rambling about the internets, my friend John Watson and I are hard at work on a fun project involving Common Lisp.  While he fiddles with memcached, I am working on the beginnings of our site, which we plan to build using Common Lisp to dynamically generate HTML and skin it using CSS to make it look all pretty and WEB 2.0**.

This bold plan would be a hell of a lot harder if not for Weitz, and his wonderful libraries hunchentoot and cl-who.  Weitz, self-effacing devil that he is, is quick to admit that many other Lisp markup languages exist.  And they do.  But few work so seamlessly with his major accomplishment, hunchentoot!

hunchentoot is a hilariously named*** Common Lisp webserver.  Currently running on its own right now, it is serving me the very first test pages for our site.  I am extraordinarily pleased with it so far, and cannot recommend it highly enough.

This is a pretty short update for today (lacking even a lolcat!) because I have an electrical engineering exam to study for and some work to do for my day job.  I may throw some more up later tonight, but most likely I will just collapse somewhere.  The lazy is strong with this one.







*  Patently untrue.  I only know one, whom I met twice.  He dates my girlfriend's best friend.  Regardless, he is awesome, and has raised my opinion of Germans in general.

**  Rounded corners.  Lots of rounded corners.

***  I am forbidden from talking about it in public, due to the odd glances I have started to garner:  "Something smells fishy with hunchentoot!"

I often wonder about what my life would be like if I continued to work as a developer for large companies for the rest of my life.  I can see two possible paths: 

1)  Stay Programmer.

2)  Become Manager.

This is not a new dilemma.  I'm sure people have faced it before with jobs in various fields other than software development.  But it takes on a vital air when discussed among programmers and/or managers because the two are so different, and yet often one is promoted into the other.

Programmers* are very similar animals.  They are all usually less than outgoing, interested in solving curious problems, and inclined to focus on one thing to the point where everything else becomes a dull background roar. 

Managers are outgoing people.  They have to be if they are any good at their craft, which is the sole act of dealing with and coordinating people.  They enjoy nothing more than working with people, talking to people, and thinking about what to do with people and their time.  They focus on a wide variety of tasks and they need to be able to context switch quickly.

Now you may think that I am about to start slagging managers as useless and talentless individuals.  And some are.  But a good manager is an extremely useful thing.  He solves logistical problems, and aids the programmers with whatever is holding them up.  An enabler who helps people get shit done, with a minimum of intrusion otherwise.

Nine times out of ten, programmers make rotten managers.  They hate talking to people, they hate meetings longer than 10 minutes, and most of all, they hate to stop programming, which is essentially what you must do when you become a manager.  Once in a while you will see an excellent manager promoted from a programmer who truly understands his employees, and is an absolute joy to work for with a laissez-faire management style and a no-bullshit attitude.  These are gems that must be coveted beyond imagining:  if you work for a manager like this, keep working there.  And make sure he doesn't get fired!

This is mostly just an unstructured rant about how annoyed I am at the preponderance of shitty managers in software development today.  And it is a difficult problem to fix:  while most promoted from programmers suck, at least they are in touch with the problems programmers have.  Nothing is worse than some business-school idiot with no programming experience being tapped to lead a dev team. 

So what is the answer?  I would begin by offering MAJOR salary increases for programmers becoming managers, and still allow them to program as they see fit, and delegate some managerial duties to an assistant as possible.  This will keep them focused, interested, and ready to lead without boring them.  I like this model, and if I ever have to become a manager (it is sometimes unavoidable if you wish to keep working at a particular company), it will definitely be my goal to set up my reign in this manner. 





*  When I use the word programmer, I mean a real programmer.  Not someone who is doing it because they thought a CS degree was a ticket to instant free wealth.  Someone who would be programming even if it were a completely unpopular social stigma akin to having herpes, and if it paid nothing at all, and in fact cost one money.  The people who understand and love their profession, which is writing software.  My God, I have a chip on my shoulder the size of Mt. Everest, don't I?
 

Freddie Mercury said it best:  spending all your time and money to keep yourself alive. 

I would like to go on record saying that I wholly endorse the trend of super-bootstrapped startups such as 8coupons, which is featured in that article.  It pleases me beyond measure to see people going to such lengths to pursue their startup goals.  Quite frankly it makes me feel extremely lazy and underachieving, picturing these people cranking out code with steady jobs while I work piecemeal at best, with only a part-time programming job and some undergrad classes to distract me.  I should seriously take a page out of their book and man up, crank out some code, and get shit done.

In fact, I think I will!  Screw this blog, I'm going to work!

...right after I go out for some drinks at Beehive and hang out with my girlfriend.  Having a girlfriend in Boston is dangerous to your work ethic!