This is one of the reasons why I have zero interest in wasting my hard earned money propping up the insane housing bubble in western cities.
Building a simple house is a 5000 year old technology.
I know that since we brought a small piece of land outside the city - brought the raw material and paid some local laborer to help us put our family home together.
It cost us a grand total of 10,000 dollars. The only difference was - we did it in india where there are no nonsense housing regulation.
Getting internet was supposed to be hard, but we were allowed to just use the telephone pole to get copper internet ( instead of fibre ).
From a business perspective - no wonder it temping to offshore - when putting a roof over your head eats so much into your income.
I used to be a structural engineer, and I can tell you _exactly_ what you're giving up if you're interested. The cost difference isn't $10k vs $700k because of building materials. The cost difference is $5k (land) + $5k (construction) vs $600k (land) vs $100k (construction).
What I've seen is that most people in the West end up thinking that that $95k difference is worth it.
Let me start with a true story of what happened to me the first time I represented myself in court back around 2005. Someone had moved my motorbike to make a bit more room to park their stupid oversized Hummer. My bike was now just past the legal line so I got a $45 ticket. Outraged I vowed to bring this to court. In the pre-meeting with the prosecutor the cop didn't even remember the location of the motorcycle, let alone what was around, whereas I had drawings and the license plate number of the Hummer owner.
The prosecutor said that if I plead guilty with an explanation that they would drop the charges. So that is what we did. Right afterwards I got a $40 "courtroom fee" because I'd plead guilty. That's when I learned the adage "A man who is his own lawyer has a fool for a client".
5000 years ago children died because they crawled between the banister railings. Our building code stops that oversight. 5000 years ago houses collapsed during hurricanes. Our building codes severely reduced that. I could go on and on.
The main issue isn't the building code. The issue is that it is difficult in modern cities to get the local population to agree to expanding the housing stock with taller buildings. It ruins views, it's noisy, excess supply collapses housing prices. It changes the city's charm and culture. So they elect people that slow it down.
The Japanese have been dealing with earthquakes for eons and the housing fashion from the previous era could still crush you like a bug if the pillars give out (those tile roofs are -heavy-).
I think there's a quite different lesson in these codes. What's the difference between software developers that don't have a Code and electricians or plumbers who do? Not all that much. Except that we get to spend a lot of time trying to talk people out of doing stuff using reason and logic. People who got the job they did instead of your job because they weren't quite so good at reason and logic.
Pull the sort of things we deal with every day on an electrician? Fuck you, I'm not doing that, it's not to code. Now cough up the time and materials to do it right, or we're done here. Don't like it? The next guy you call is going to tell you the exact same thing. Have a nice day.
"you might think all those tests are a waste of everyone's time and your money, but that's the Code so we gotta do them"
There'd be less programs written, and those programs would be more expensive. But we might finally start making a dent in the "80% of software projects fail" statistic that hasn't changed since the 60's.
Careful with things like survivorship bias. Even as recently as the mid 1800s there was an earthquake that took out ton of buildings, temples, and dams in Nagano, Japan (Google Zenkōji earthquake).
But I do understand and partially agree with your primary point.
I'm not sure I understand what the parent's point was, however I thought it would be interesting to point out that there are almost no old buildings in Japan. Especially for houses, you would be really hard pressed to find more than a handful of inhabited houses that are more than 30 years old in any given city. The Japanese fashion is to knock down the old house and build a new one in it's place. There is virtually no market for old houses (and, in fact, you will often get less money trying to sell land with a house on it than if you demolish the house yourself).
Of course there are lots of old temples and shrines but even those have often had every single piece replaced. I was really surprised a couple of years ago when one of the local shrines tore down their building completely and rebuilt it exactly the same!
Whether this has to do with earthquakes or not, I'm not entirely sure. My wife and I have been thinking of buying a house and I keep having to remind myself that I will lose money if I ultimately sell. Our current plan is to wait until we're a bit older and then buy a not-too-old used house at a discount ;-)
What part of Japan do you live in? At least in Nagoya there is at least one "Showa" house per block. They are knocked down when their inhabitants (generally older people) stop living in them, but it's not hard to find them.
It was known that older houses were dangerous in earthquakes (I believe the safer building code dates from the 80s), but no one was really worried about it until the Kobe earthquake where most damage was borne by older buildings.
I'm in Shizuoka. Possibly they are more sensitive due to overdue Tokai earthquake. I was actually living in one of the oldest buildings in my town and it was probably 50 years old. It was demolished 2 years ago.
From what I understand, the central pillar supporting many of those temples is reaching end of life, after 5-900 years depending on conditions. So you have to disassemble it to rebuild due to the heavy but rational reliance on the strength of the old growth timbers.
I only meant that even among people who know how to build crazy well, accidents still happen. But that doesn't negate the need for standards of construction.
Charming? Drive through any single family detached neighborhood in America during the summer and count how many people are actually enjoying their yards.
Where you see charm some of us see waste. Grass is ugly and so are single detached family homes. Row houses look nice, so do skyscrapers. Inventing a simulacrum for the country estate and calling it a "dream" is a bad joke I'd like everyone to start laughing at.
This is it. This is the mother of all bad policies in the USA! From keeping African Americans out of our neighborhoods via red lining, to increased police presence, to one generation's artificial chokehold on the housing stock. Americans should feel nothing but disgust for most of our housing policy, and single family homes should be derided as one of single worst allocation of resources the American public makes. People defend these things as lifestyle choices, and almost never live into the carrying capacity of the asset they buy. It is one lifestyle choice I feel comfortable judging.
Just so no one thinks I don't have any skin in the game I do have a child.
You're a delusion fool if you think row houses are nice, especially as the aesthetic of the house is the least important part of living in it.
I live in the UK where they are common, they're a nightmare to live in, you can hear people arguing or babies screaming 4 houses down.
A lot of houses are detached but very close to each other or semi-detached (linked to one other house). Both are far more pleasant to live in than row houses or sky scrapers.
My father built our 20x30ft family room add on. He built
it to be sound proof enough that he could practice his drumming and not annoy the neighbors. I don't think he'd be able to do that in most apartments
I live in one of those areas. I mock their attachment to yards. I do love that we have plenty of space that's ours under our rules. That's front for public stuff, back for semi-private, an insulated house for noise reduction (love that), and so on. As often is with suburbs, it's close enough to big city to get its benefits without its problems. It's all that for under a grand a month.
Is all that normal for the big cities with dense, multi-story housing?
>Americans should feel nothing but disgust for most of our housing policy, and single family homes should be derided as one of single worst allocation of resources the American public makes.
In your opinion.
Some people think driving cars are bad. Some people think eating meat is bad. Some people think space heating is a waste of electricity.
Everybody seems to think their particular way of living is perfect and everybody else is either too wasteful or doesn't know how to live.
Your argument really is just "this is my subjective opinion of how to live and people who disagree are wrong".
The issue is that taking away that choice is damaging to many people. I think that the statement "most people in the West agree" glosses over an important detail - perhaps most people who have the money agree, and the others are forced to go along with it.
I would far rather have a home that has 'risky banister railings' if that meant I could actually afford it.
Mental health is as important as physical health, if not moreso - what's worse, risk of eviction, or having to pay attention near the stairwell? I get that this is an isolated example, but I'd take worse insulation, no solar, worse security, everything, if it meant I could get a home and slowly improve it myself with time.
If that means I have to live rurally - so be it - but as far as I can tell that means living outside of the country I was born in (UK), which is quite sad.
I have broadly libertarian leanings too. But this isn't just about _you_. This is about your guests, your children, the person that buys your house next, the person that lives next door (in the event of a fire). I agree that the housing situation sucks right now, but the solution is to embrace smaller residences and lots of tallish buildings. I'm currently vacationing in Vietnam. It's a terrible annoyance dealing with exposed wires and crappy houses. Someone didn't have money for a drain, so they threw their (still very hot) excess soup from their pot out the window and it got all over me.
I think you should be able to build it the way you want, and if you wish to rent it, or sell it, then it has to brought up to standards. I bought a house with deck railings that were far apart even though I had a 3 month old baby. We kept the door to the deck locked, and I installed railings the following Spring. I grew up in Brooklyn, but I now live in rural East Java, Indonesia. Yep, life is very different, but I like it. You adapt. Some people choose not to, and that is their perogative. I think rent control is a big issue in the sense that it allows people who can truly afford a higher rent, a nice lifestyle. A friend lived in TriBeca NYC, paying $600 per month for a > 2000 sq. ft. loft in an area of million dollar lofts. She could afford it, or to move to Brooklyn at the time, but did not want to leave the luxury afforded to her by rent control. It's not old people eating cat food out of cans in unheated apartments as much as people protray it. I lived in Chelsea, NYC in the late 1990s. I paid a fair rent, a lot of older people paid rent control, or their grandkids who lived there while they lived elsewhere in the suburbs. I spoke to the owner of the building, who showed me the boiler that was constantly in need of repair. He said he wanted to buy a new one, but 90% of the tenants were paying around $400 per month rent. The boiler installed was over $100K. I like to see both sides. My belief is we should do away with rent control, let the market stabilize, build affordable housing up to code, and ride the wave until it becomes a better situation. Subsidies, and delaying the solution is only creating more disparity.
who consented to the conditions of your house when entering. If he is not sure he ought to hire a civil engineer to inspect and verify the safety status of the house or ask the host to do it.
>your children,
who is your ward and is subjected to the decisions of its parent with regards to all of life choices
>the person that buys your house next,
ditto the guest situation except for buying
>the person that lives next door
this is the only legitimate case for regulation, to protect the public and/or third party.
>so they threw their (still very hot) excess soup from their pot out the window and it got all over me.
This is not a problem of housing but of manners. You can get rid of hot soup without infringing of other people's ability to walk around the public area and not be wet.
I think the solution is to move away from cities. I'm planning to do so. I'm just going to be sad if it means leaving my country because you don't want me anywhere near you, even if it means I'm on the horizon from your window.
It really is mostly about the land value, with a bit of local planning opposition. Allowing people to build un-code houses would save a surprisingly small amount of money in the short term at the cost of all sorts of long-term problems.
In the UK if you want a house but are completely agnostic about where, there's Stoke-on-Trent; the council were selling houses for £1 on the condition that the new owner renovated them to code. Otherwise, rural living in Scotland is also quite cheap.
"...5000 years ago children died because they crawled between the banister railings. Our building code stops that oversight. 5000 years ago houses collapsed during hurricanes. Our building codes severely reduced that. I could go on and on..."
Interestingly, the same thing happens in large software development shops. Somebody breaks production by doing X. So now there's a process in place never to do X (Even when it might make sense). Somebody forgets Y. So now everybody has to do Y. And so on.
Overall, over time it's much easier to take out the hammer and create one-size-fits-all answers to every catastrophe that occurs. Repeat and rinse this process over several years, and you've got a software shop that's running ten times slower than everybody else.
Overall, over time it's much easier to take out the hammer and create one-size-fits-all answers to every catastrophe that occurs. Repeat and rinse this process over several years, and you've got a software shop that's running ten times slower than everybody else.
...and not killing anyone.
"People have to channel their creativity into changing the process," says Keller, "not changing the software."
"Most people choose to spend their money at the wrong end of the process," says Munson. "In the modern software environment, 80% of the cost of the software is spent after the software is written the first time — they don't get it right the first time, so they spend time flogging it. In shuttle, they do it right the first time."
"The most important things the shuttle group does — carefully planning the software in advance, writing no code until the design is complete, making no changes without supporting blueprints, keeping a completely accurate record of the code — are not expensive. The process isn't even rocket science. Its standard practice in almost every engineering discipline except software engineering."
However, for a isolated suburban house - it made little sense to put all that measures you are talking about. If we were living in a major city - it would make more sense to add some of those things.
4 walls and a roof should not make someone bankrupt.
Most of the cost of housing is not construction, but land costs. Construction costs could be $0, and it wouldn't affect affordability all that much in currently expensive areas.
The Western practice of using a house as an investment vehicle and a bank account is partly to blame. Once a person buys a home they instantly become a NIMBY as they are now leveraged into a scarce asset and have a vested interest in keeping it scarce.
You definitely don't care when you're dead. In that split second before the disaster, maybe the point of silly regulations like not collapsing at the first hint of an earthquake or not going up in flames in seconds will become clear.
Choose your level of risk. I am sure if you want all those features, you can make the determination yourself. If you want to live dangerously, then live dangerously. I personally support this outlook. Better have cheap housing with risk than rent.
If you are arguing from the perspective of low income people, most of whom rent, they aren't looking in detail at how the building was built, just the price.
In other words, in this future poor neighbourhoods would collapse like 3rd world countries while rich neighbourhoods would get hairline cracks in the drywall.
They had this problem in cases of activists going after slumlords that weren't maintaining their buildings. The problem was, in order to get tenants to rent a building in that state, the slumlords had to discount the rent by pretty much exactly the cost of the repairs not made. Paying for the repairs would have required (and allowed) rents to be increased to more than the existing tenants were able to pay.
So every time the activists forced a slumlord to bring their building to code, fixing it allowed them to increase the rent and the people the activists were trying to help were forced to move out because they could no longer afford it.
But at least they made it less likely that the whole city would catch on fire.
You're choosing your neighbour's level of risk too, though. Even a house built to regs has a hard time staying not on fire when the one right beside it is going up like a pile of tinder.
If you build for low long-term cost, you're not using wood anyway because of fungus and termites. You're using cementboard, concrete blocks, stucco, and similar. That won't burn. The roof can be corrugated metal.
So you'll be perfectly understanding when, having adopted your preferred level of risk, people don't send in crews to help you. That we'll just bring in bulldozers and start over.
Maybe that lot on the slope of the volcano wasn't such a great idea after all?
(writing this from vacation in Hawaii): I have the sense that the rest of the world will help out if you Kiwi's get into trouble. Ditto if the Pacific Northwest takes a hit.
It wasn't a great point. We live where we live, for the most part. There are few places free of potential natural disasters. (The scope of the PNW quakes were only realized in the last 20 years or so...).
But it's colossally stupid to build substandard housing in such an area, to the point where it's a net win for society to enforce some minimum quality.
Fires, for instance, are not the Huge Fucking Deal they were a hundred years ago. We have better fire-fighting equipment, but that's kind of the booby prize. Better to make things fire-resistant, and to not cause fires to begin with.
Please keep your beliefs in your world, where your decisions apparently don't have consequences for others. Around here, I like to think that society benefits every time a building that's up to code fails to fall on a passersby, or fails to set a neighboring building on fire because it burns slowly and coolly enough to be put out first.
Natural gas piping is done at such low pressures in residential environments that it's basically a joke. I think it's about 0.5psi (or 14" of water column) which in the grand scheme of pressures is very low. People can generate greater pressures with their lungs.
EDIT: I'm not saying that one should do their own natural gas piping as in many places it's technically illegal unless you're a licensed plumber. But it's certainly not rocket science. The only reason it's "harder" than plumbing compressed air is that if compressed air leaks a tad, it's no big deal. You have to get rather tight on gas piping because of the consequences of a leak, not because it's so difficult to get it tight.
In Most of Canada and a lot of northern states, if you have no insulation then you soon won't have indoor plumbing, but you'll have a nice ice skating rink in your house.
In all fairness - People have been building houses in similar climates for 5000 years, and while they didn't have indoor plumbing, they surely built their houses to some standard of insulation.
I was reaffirming the reasoning behind rtpg and Pxtl's prioritizing insulation over indoor plumbing and further explaining why it is a necessary pre-condition to indoor plumbing.
I spent my summers in rural Russia, occasionally in the winter. I'll take the insulation over the indoor plumbing and the electricity, and trust me, so would you if that was the binary choice.
It should converge on eating about the same percentage of your income - people in lower cost of living areas are typically paid less. Markets remove arbitrage opportunities eventually.
Enron's accounting fraud was only discovered because they're a public company and forced to disclose those records. Once someone actually looked at what Enron was up to, the shorts took over and hammered them until they folded. Only then did regulators actually take a look.
By being a public company, Enron couldn't hide its fraud. I have concerns about the lack of similar checks on unicorns.
A hike in the cost of labour was the reason why the industrial revolution happened in Britain vs India.
Even today, the cost of labour is so little in India that there is no need to innovate in robotics,AI etc.
To me the question should be framed as - do we want minimum wage workers to be slaves ? This is essentially the argument being made.
If robots are actually cheaper then why haven't they being deployed yet ? Having done research in robotics when I was younger - there are more productive use of roboticist's time then to go after minimum wage service workers. Its non-trivial to exchange a waiter with a robot, and we already have "ready made" food - so why do people still go restaurant ?
The only thing a hike in minimum wage is going to do is cut into the profits of restaurant owners, landlords and big chain corporations.
But there is actual value in doing things the npm/unix way.
Just yesterday I used a module to turn numbers to comma separated strings 10000 -> 10,000
Could I have written a function to do it ?
Sure
But every less line of code I need to write saves me time.
Programming is fundamentally a creative field ( which means there is no absolute truths ) - and each individual developer should be given the freedom judge when to write code and when to use other's people modules.
I would say that this whole fiasco just proves how awesome programming has become - remember the days when adding a dependency was hell ? Now we live in a world where adding dependency has so little cost that we rather not even spend 10 minutes writing a function.
To me its an improvement over the state of affairs from the past.
Its also cheaper to switch dependencies - imagine if the leftpad disaster was somewhere in the window's kernel ? or in std:: ?
There is always trade-offs in every decision you make in software - I think we are moving in the right direction.
"But there is actual value in doing things the npm/unix way."
This is where the node community falls down.
They think because there is value in sometimes doing it this way, there is always value in doing it this way.
Rarely is the right answer for architecture/programming/etc at one of the extremes.
The left-pad debacle is not an indictment of small dependencies. The problem would have still happened even if left-pad were a 10,000-line dependency, if that 10,000-line left-pad was as popular as the 10-line left-pad was.
The issue was that authors in the npm ecosystem could pull their packages and cause havoc. Copying code is a partial workaround for this problem for small dependencies only, but the problem should be solved at the npm level--and once it's solved there, the virtues of copying code go away.
I don't buy your argument that "the virtues of copying code go away" in any way, shape or form. It seems somewhat arrogant to me to think that people have spend decades on software engineering approaches to these kinds of issues, but y'all think "yeah, we solved that, no problem!".
But I'm not going to argue this further. I guess time will tell.
This doesn't seem responsive to my argument at all.
I'm speaking from experience with a package manager that was specifically designed up front to avoid the left-pad issue (before left-pad even was a thing). In that environment, dependencies, even small ones, are great. With an overrides feature and lockfiles, you get all the benefit of copying code (ability to hack on it, responsibility for updates, reproducible builds) without the hassles of copying code and trying to stay in sync with upstream.
Copying code isn't something you have to spend decades to invent. Rather, I see it as giving up on proper package management. There are coherent arguments that package managers aren't worth it (though I disagree with them), but I don't agree that it's arrogant to try to build package managers that scale up and down, any more than any attempt to use software to solve an engineering problem is arrogant.
OF course there's value. There is also a cost to adding another dependency.
> But every less line of code I need to write saves me time.
It saves you time now. The recent left-pad brouhaha is a very good example of how it can also waste a lot more time. This focus on only the initial development time without any consideration of the maintenance cost always creates problems in the long-term.
Maybe this attitude is popular with programmers on short contracts that won't be around to maintain the project? It sounds plausible, but I'm not sure. At a minimum this shows the human tendency to be very bad at evaluating risk.
But every less line of code I need to write saves me time.
How much time did you take to find the code, read the documentation for it to make sure it does exactly what you need, did you budget time for the future when it doesn't work exactly as you wanted and you'll have to either find another module or fix it yourself, etc.?
If it's something nontrivial (e.g. SSL/TLS), then it certainly makes sense to reuse. But if it's trivial, then the overhead can be far greater than the savings.
Of course, the definition of "trivial" varies greatly depending on the skill level of the programmer.
I think the reason people felt it was silly is that there is a whole library (a tiny one, sure, but still a dedicated library) for that one function. If there had been a left-pad function in a larger utility library that everyone was using, nobody would have thought it was silly.
Why would a larger utility library would have been better?
Replacing a big dependency is much more difficult. If the reason is "because now a lot of dependencies could dissappear/change" then that's an argument against the npm inmutable history issue and not modularity.
The bar for publishing needs to be higher because there is too much broken, incomplete shite out there. Usually because they just pushed the internal quality, undocumented, untested garbage they just wrote. Don't test arguments, don't set constraints. Tag on a sentence of hurried description, done.
I don't understand the half-assed mentality that does that. That's how one makes the world a worse place, not a better one.
> Additionally: The core problem wasn't the existence or the reliance of dependencies. But simply the fact that the package was no longer available.
Which is - no matter how big the packages are - a huge problem.
This really misses the point. Every dependency is its own point of failure. When you explode your dependency tree into 1,000s of individual dependencies, you vastly increase the odds of something going wrong.
Making package publishing immutable won't save you. What happens when the dev of one of those 1,000 packages you rely on has his or her account hacked and a malicious point revision is pushed? Even if you pin all your dependencies, do all your 1,000 dependencies pin all of theirs?
Micropackages like left_pad and is_array had hundreds of dependent packages and a tiny handful of watchers on the repo itself. The NPM community is lucky that the first major consequence of their micropackage-insanity was only a brief outage.
> The core problem wasn't the existence or the reliance of dependencies. But simply the fact that the package was no longer available.
I figure the social dynamics bundled with a micropackage model matter. If you have a few big packages with lots of owners, central dependencies are less likely to be deleted by unanimous consent of owners than the same software divided up into many packages each with a single owner.
You're mostly correct but the beauty of talking in absolutes is that I just need to give one counter example. Y Combinator's darling (and still a source of confusion for me because I don't understand how it managed to be so successful against all odds) is Dropbox.
So to reiterate, I'm not saying you're wrong. HN and by extension most news reporting and aggregation seems to be negative. People think it is a work of public relations machinery when we hear positive news (and sadly they are also usually correct).
Don't quote me on this but I think in the original Matrix movie they talk about how they created perfect world for people but they kept rejecting it because they could tell it was not the real world or something. I think I'd feel cynical when I hear mostly positive news most of the time. Sorry, I can't help it. Even in this piece about dropbox five years ago… I was still suspicious about whether they'd continue to exist today. I mean they were paying Amazon for all that storage. I knew a lot of my college friends had drop box accounts but I didn't know anyone who paid for it. I still don't know more than three people who have paid for dropbox.
Modern Software companies do not survive by making the majority of there users pay. They survive by generating revenue from power users.
The simple fact is - the world operates on a network of debt and saving. So 400 jobs lost at blackrocks - means 400 new opening for green jobs in Australia.
Capital really does not live to stay in one place - it always wants to work. If you have 10 million dollars in the bank - you will be burning money just due to inflation.
>So 400 jobs lost at blackrocks - means 400 new opening for green jobs in Australia.
This is not necessarily true. People can and will hold onto their cash negating any growth of the market in the face of job losses, its not a zero sum game. In fact job layoffs can increase panic and increase hoarding of capital.
> If you have 10 million dollars in the bank - you will be burning money just due to inflation.
1-2% deflation can be better in certain market climates than investments which create jobs, or you put it in a safe investment such as bonds which is in some sense hoarding, you don't take on significant risk to create anything you just park your cash somewhere that it will not suffer losses from inflation. Both of these circumstances do not grow jobs or the market.
> Capital really does not live to stay in one place - it always wants to work. If you have 10 million dollars in the bank - you will be burning money just due to inflation.
Yeah, I've heard people explain it to me before. I don't fully understand it but I appreciate the fact that inflation is not always a bad thing and neither are taxes.
For example, if the people who owned all the land wanted to leave it fallow then they'd have to pay the tax on it somehow so they have an incentive to not leave it fallow.
I guess similarly with inflation and capital. You can leave your money doing nothing but there is a penalty for doing so (because inflation).
Ummm what happens when you apply your argument to allowing them to spend it on alcohol or cigarettes or a car or a thousand other things? This is a flawed argument my friend. No one group has a right to enforce their social, moral, economic or other ideology on another group based on what the enforcing group thinks is "right". That's a slippery slope with extra grease on it.
Different methods of governing can basically all boil down to a simple balance scale:
On one side you have the rights of the individual and on the other side you have the rights of the community.
Some people tend to lean the scale toward individual rights and others toward community rights.
Smaller government tends to handle the balance by staying out of the way until it's necessary that they step in. Bigger government tends to handle the balance by marking clear (or blurry) lines and moving them when necessary.
In your line of reasoning, should we perhaps also introduce mandatory drug testing for people with low income, and prohibit them from buying alcohol and cigarettes? Surely, these purchases have more social consequences than lottery tickets.
Well then the government should create laws allowing it to dictate what you can spend your money on if you make less than $X per year. You know, to prevent social consequences.
This concept of "social consequences" is essentially a flipped framing of a situation to incorporate an implicit utility function of whomever is using the term.
If a person or group of people does not act in a way that benefits you, they still have not harmed you. It simply means they have not chosen to conform to your expectations.
I guess it's hard for some people to relate to a large portion of any future savings being 'invested' in lottery tickets ("the money just goes towards your college education either way!") and spent on cigarettes -- not that hard at all when it's been your reality.
One could make the argument that there's a difference between letting people do stupid things that only indirectly and only in certain contexts hurt others (ex spending the rent money on lottery tickets) and letting people do stupid things that by definition hurt others (shooting up a school, smoking in public and populated places) or have a significant liklihood of harming others (driving drunk).
Of course this is always an awkward line to walk, and the definition of stupid is entirely subjective. Most things that make people happy aren't totally "rational".
You would be surprised how many people have done this. The average office worker doesn't have a development environment on their computer, but they have Excel, and they have a coworker who was a whiz who said, "Did you know you could do this?"
They just kept automating task after task, silently, without the IT department ever knowing. 90% of them never thought of it as coding, and 10% realized they could make more money as an expert who knows how to coerce excel combined with their domain knowledge than they could as a programmer.
I've been at top 20 banks in the world that run 14 hour jobs in Excel that import data from web services, run analysis, and FTP result sets elsewhere. They were used to analyze risk on tens of billions of dollars worth of securities.
They were riddled with bugs, but it let the front-line traders iterate quickly and prototype something that the backend team (my team) could turn into a "real" reporting process.
Absolutely. I think it is the rapid prototyping aspect of spreadsheets that is perhaps the most powerful. For analysing large amounts of data they are obviously not great. But they excel (pardon the pun) at providing an environment in which to quickly formulate and visualise numerical models - because they are reactive so you can see what happens when you change inputs - without having to recompile, or manually rerun code.
I've done this a lot. I've always programmed but I'd say the most used things I've ever done are Excel workbooks. It's great, you don't really have to worry too much about compatibility. You're never like hey install this program so you can use this other program. I don't have to make a 'ui'.
Sure they're prone to breakage, they're kind of fiddly and inelegant. But they work and get the work done which is what I need to do at the end of the day.
And all these little macros could be one of the largest sources of increased productivity attributable to computers in history. Maybe even _the_ largest. I'm completely serious.
I've seen office workflows sped up by 20X or more with a little 1-2-3 or Excel macro hacking. Everyday minor miracles to the people who previously slaved at manually munging data. A student intern spends a few hours one day on macros, and the office staff each save three hours every day for years to come.
The spreadsheet has always and will always be the killer app of the PC.
"If you have been doing programming in excel for the past 20 years then you are simply a fool - sorry."
You've got to be kidding! Excel programmers rarely worry about the next paycheck. Programming in Excel may not be the most invigorating intellectual pursuit but it's a helluva steady job - there's always something that needs fixing!
I remember tweaking Excel input 'system' and decorate a spreadsheet with additional hints and checks so I can go furiously fast on a very large input-operator level task.
This stencila thing seems to be a marriage of the two: you enter your data in a spreadsheet type environment, and then you can write a reactive document backed by that data.
Leaving aside all the advertisement and marketing.
JSPM -> sounds like a good idea until you try using it, and SystemJS is just sad. Its not the fault of the specs, its just that the creator is having difficulty with funding - as with any other good open source projects.
Webpack -> Slow, unstable and documentation is incomplete.
RollUp -> I am not going to listen to the author's comment on how awesome his product is -_-
I still think browserify is the only bundler out there that is sort of stablish.
What apple is saying today is something that it has always said - but its only recently that people in america are too poor to buy american products.
I grew up around windows and linux, and whenever I tell that in a job interview - people think I am not being serious since "real developers" use mac.
In my first software job - I was told to abandon my personal cheap linux and use the company's brand new expensive apple - even though I was more productive on my cheap linux.
Apple has always been like that, its just that most people who come from money do not hear it.
Edit:
Also you will notice this in poorer countries - a strong ecosystem for recycling exists everywhere outside of the US/UK.
When I brought my first bike in the UK, I wanted to repair it and was told to just ditch it and get a new one !
It was extremely odd to me since I expected that bike to last at-least 20 years.
When my 3 year old laptop stopped working - I had it repaired rather than buy a newer one - even though repairing was almost as expensive as getting a new one. It just fell really wrong ditching a laptop rather than repairing it.
Maybe you are right - western societies do worship materialism.
> Also you will notice this in poorer countries - a strong ecosystem for recycling exists everywhere outside of the US/UK. When I brought my first bike in the UK, I wanted to repair it and was told to just ditch it and get a new one !
I'd call the US, UK poor for lacking a system of recycling. And indeed in many ways they are poorer than the most well functioning societies.
Maybe OP wanted to say "reuse/refurbish" instead of "recycle". In less rich countries there are thriving second hand markets, online and offline. Many sell the obsolete hardware they no longer need instead of throwing it away.
I still have some 9-year-old "capacitor plague" Dells. I got them gratis--due to the bad capacitors, naturally--and desoldered and re-capped them for about $15 each.
But desoldering and replacing non-SM PCB components is not the sort of repair that most people would feel comfortable doing, even if they can change the oil in their cars.
Based on the cost differential of something like an XBox mod chip versus the same mod chip plus no-hassle installation service, buying an all-new device assembled mostly by robots and low-wage Chinese people is simply more cost-effective in every country where knowing how to use a soldering iron is worth more than a few dollars per hour.
The only way around that is to teach kids how to build and repair custom electronics as part of the regular school curriculum. I don't know about you, but I learned to make sand-mold aluminum castings, silk-screened t-shirts, wooden bookends, and to spot-weld sheet metal in my 8th grade shop class. My classmates and I really would have been better off replacing the t-shirt module with custom-etched circuit boards and simple electronics soldering. That was close to the time when Heathkit stopped making hobbyist electronics kits, too.
> I grew up around windows and linux, and whenever I tell that in a job interview - people think I am not being serious since "real developers" use mac.
How true is this? I have noticed the proliferation of Macs in the developer community and I was wondering how much it would hurt me professionally by not owning one. Do devs really make snap judgements based on your platform of choice and could this impact me professionally in the long term?
Real real developers use a precision flathead screwdriver and a bank of DIP switches.~
One of the great triumphs of computing was abstracting the algorithm away from the specifics of the hardware using compilers. We have the good fortune to be able to configure those compilers to generate several varieties of executable containers, such as ELF, a.out, COFF, EXE (MZ), EXE (PE/COFF), JAR, Mach-O, and others. As long as the OS has an installed virtual machine or ABI that can handle the executable, it will be able to run it.
If anyone got snooty with me about my hardware, I think I'd consider myself lucky to not need to work with them.
Does it have a text editor? Does it have a compiler? Yes to both means that real developers can use it.
From my experience this shift occurred over the past 10 years or so, starting around when the MacBook Pro was released. Gradually Macs gained acceptance as developer machines, not just "creative" workstations.
I think platform preference still varies widely by industry. Macs might be common in app and web development but in engineering and systems development Windows is dominant.
Do not worry too much. Its much easier to "hack" dumb recruiters then C code.
As someone who recently graduated and is "one of them damn kids" - a lot of people from my graduating class know a lot more about marketing then actual programming.
Since 2008 - the world has became a much more cruel place - and that has forced many of us to graduating since then to play an arms race with "trends" - switch jobs constantly and be selfish.
The way I see anyone who has been writing production code since 1990 is a WW2 veteran. You guys have been through the PC revolution, Internet revolution, survived the dot com bubble, shipped code before git, stackoverflow.
I think if you projected that experience into confidence you could easily do whatever you wanted - you deserve it !
Building a simple house is a 5000 year old technology.
I know that since we brought a small piece of land outside the city - brought the raw material and paid some local laborer to help us put our family home together.
It cost us a grand total of 10,000 dollars. The only difference was - we did it in india where there are no nonsense housing regulation.
Getting internet was supposed to be hard, but we were allowed to just use the telephone pole to get copper internet ( instead of fibre ).
From a business perspective - no wonder it temping to offshore - when putting a roof over your head eats so much into your income.