> I often joke that my goal is to become independently wealthy so that I can afford to get some work done. Mainly that’s about being able to do things without having to explain them first, so that the finished product can be the explanation. I think this will be a major labor saving improvement.
I believe this is true for almost every ambitious (maker/engineer). It’s really hard to convince Management about something new because they don’t experience the pain. Sometimes their Job depends on not understanding it.
Probably a reason why Startups outperform big companies in certain niches.
The big dilemma right now is there’s little funding available that can compete with the salaries of big companies. Rents have shot up so high that it’s not easy to take 6 months of to build something so you don’t have to explain. Failure has become expensive.
My theory is that even though people are getting paid more, we’re in this weird paradox of having less innovation.
It is sad that we're at this point where people can't just live in a relaxed manner tinkering on new ideas. I remember Silicon Valley in the early 90s you really had a more hippie mentality and not everyone had a high paying salary and some people were just hanging out and talking and try new things. Austin has a little bit of this Vibe now.
don’t get why everyone’s pretending you need to live in silicon valley or a major metro area to tinker for 6 months. i saved enough from a year in silicon valley to support myself multiple years in other parts of the country.
I think it's fear of unknown coupled with challenge uprooting. So many of us are tied down in our familiar big metro lives with a nice community but our kids will see so much pressure
and Austin has more and more CA residents, they're immediately trying to make Austin a city just like where they departed, so they can move elsewhere in the future for further damages, it's epidemic.
I think a lot of it depends on where you live. If you're willing to live in a crazy far away place in the US or Canada OR you're in Eastern Europe/Taiwan/Thailand where prices haven't quite gone bananas as they have here, you can still do this sort of thing.
Historically, though, a lot of the innovative things we have enjoyed came because of large corporations and governments willing to invest in research and development. Just take a look at the history of Bell Labs or DARPA, for example.
I've been tinkering more or less full time for half a decade. There are lots of pleasant, inexpensive places to live around the world where you can live well for 1000 USD/month (or less). To name a couple, Diamantina, Brazil, or Kiev, Ukraine. Better to speak Portuguese or Russian/Ukrainian though.
> The big dilemma right now is there’s little funding available that can compete with the salaries of big companies. Rents have shot up so high that it’s not easy to take 6 months of to build something so you don’t have to explain. Failure has become expensive.
Why not work in places where the rents are cheaper? I mean:
Money at ones's disposal = salary - costs of living.
If the rents (and thus costs of living) are much lower, one perhaps can still outcompete or at least compete with big companies.
I was a physics TA in grad school. I was very good at explaining solutions to problems, so of course during exam reviews I would get big crowds to watch the explanations. I was also somewhat aware of this principle, so during a review I was trying to get students to come up with approaches or ideas while solving a problem, and they demanded "why don't you just tell us!" It was pretty frustrating.
Watching someone explain solutions well can be dangerous, since it gives you the very real feeling of understanding, without actual understanding. To actually understand, you have to try a problem from scratch. Then you will understand why the solution/approach is what it is, and why other approaches fail, which will give you intuition about which approaches work on future problems. But counter-intuitively, you will get lost in the weeds during the process, which makes you feel like you don't understand!
Yeah, I'm kinda on the other end of this. I often didn't do as well as I should have in school because I always "understood" what was going on in the classroom. It was confusing for me when those who struggled to understand what was being taught in class did better on exams. From a cursory glance I always seemed to understand what was being taught, so I never did the deep work where you really learn the subject. I figured out better ways to really learn the subject matters later in academia. It was almost never about reading more on the subject, but rather doing more problems (ideally exams that were use in previous semesters) on the subject.
Eventually people can be educated, but what you have to do is find a way give them the experience, to put them in the situation. Sometimes this can only happen by making real the thing you are describing, but sometimes by dint of clever artifice you can simulate it.
With luck, eventually there will be an “Aha!”. If you’re really good, the “Aha!” will followed by “Oh, so that’s what you meant”. But don’t be too surprised or upset if the “Aha!” is instead followed by “Why didn’t you tell me that?”.
This jives with how children learn. Perhaps adults are actually the same in many respects. Kids don't learn how to pronounce words by listening to someone explain how to form the lips and place the tongue and vibrate the velum to form a z sound. They just learn by observing it and then trying to attempt it. Ironically, foreign language pronunciation may be one of the examples where you do need to teach adults how to do it before they try to do it because their brains have already defined what's normal and find it difficult to make foreign sounds.
But various other topics? Learn by doing. Light bulb moments by doing.
I don't know how to make this point clear and concise, my apologies.
As a Dutchie when I tried to learn Italian I just did it mostly. I did it exxagerated and in stereotypical fashion because I found it fun. Doing it in exxagerated manner also gave me the feeling I could have fun with the language, was allowed to fail and had an understanding where the exxageration came from and soon got to understand how to do it in a more normal fashion.
This approach worked so well that my teacher at one point said to a couple of Russians in class "just pronounce it like Mettamage." They were dumbfounded, "really? Do we have to? It is so over the top." They did it anyway, their Italian accents improved immediately. Before they were really monotone and had a heavy voice, and now their tone was all over the place and their voice was less heavy.
Dutch and Italian are closer in pronounciation than I initially thought. So you have a point. But not quite:
The point of this whole post is this: when I got back home to The Netherlands, I wanted to continue my studies. I suddenly lost interest in Italian. I realized that learning Italian words on paper is not the same thing as learning Italian words in Rome. The biggest reason: when I learned Italian words in Rome I saw people speak. Not only did I learn a word, I apparently remember how their lips moved to such an extent that the movement was encoded in my lips. This didn't happen straight away but if you forget a particular word a couple of times and you see the word being said all the time, you start to remember how people say the word with their lips. I could clearly remember a distinct feeling of not feeling any muscle memory in my newly learned Italian words that I learned in The Netherlands.
re: learning how to pronounce foreign words via exaggeration—a friend told me that pronouncing Japanese words in the most racist way possible actually earned him nods from his teacher.
When I was taking Chinese classes, our teacher would always demand that talk loud, exaggerate the pronunciation, and be as over-the-top as possible. Apparently there's a popular english learning method in China called Crazy English that takes this approach.
Teaching my wife her Katakana has been fun, all the words on the flash cards are loan-words, mostly from English, and the correct readings of the words certainly give her pause.
I realize that I'm replying to an old message, but I really find this interesting. I was talking with my father about proper pronunciation of Spanish, because he was very fluent in Spanish. I told of how "over the top" it felt to me, to pronounce certain things certain ways, like I was making fun of Mexicans or something. And he said, "You have to pronounce it that way, it is what they are used to hearing." What is interesting about your post to me is that I thought my attitude was common among Americans, but you add two other groups, Russians and "Dutchies". Americans like to degrade unstressed vowels to undifferentiated "schwa" sounds, while Spanish speakers retain the character of vowels when they are unstressed. To an American this difference on unstressed vowels is one of the things that good pronunciation has that makes it sound over the top to a naive American.
Your observation about lip-reading as reinforcement of the pronunciation one hears, is intriguing.
For the things we have to learn before we can do them, we learn by doing them, e.g. men become builders by building and lyreplayers by playing the lyre; so too we become just by doing just acts, temperate by doing temperate acts, brave by doing brave acts.
This is confirmed by what happens in states; for legislators make the citizens good by forming habits in them, and this is the wish of every legislator, and those who do not effect it miss their mark, and it is in this that a good constitution differs from a bad one.
This harmonises well with my career experience, and I could cite multiple examples from just the last few months without even thinking about it. (I'm not going to because the project is ongoing.)
We waste so much time explaining and justifying things to people that they're just never going to get when we'd be much better off building even a minimal experience for them so they can get it. Of course, if you try to explain this to the people concerned they still look at you like you're from Mars and complain that we "can't" work like that. It's deeply frustrating.
I absolutely loved the line about becoming independently wealthy so he has time to get some work done.
To be fair, "the people concerned" might themselves not have the authority to just diverge from the process.
The lesson to learn is that rigid processes don't work too well in creative fields such as software development. Every company wants to be innovative, i.e. come up with better ways to do things. The innovation will most likely not come from management, because they are busy doing management stuff to keep the company running smoothly. The good ideas will come from the employees that spend most of their time actually working on the subject. If a process prevents these employees from taking what they think is the best decision, then there needs to be a conversation about that process.
Rather than specify how to work, companies should focus on goals and have those goals shared across the organization: "We want to build the best possible product." The goals should inform everything else, because how can anything be more important than building the best product? If it's clear that a process is in the way, people should be empowered to change it.
Which is the point of agile: setting up your organization as a system that allows teams to do the right thing.
this is why annual internal hackerfestathons are so successful in some companies. "Hey Joe, Look at what cool things our developers/designers can do without us!"
if you try to explain this to the people concerned they still look at you like you're from Mars and complain that we "can't" work like that
The way that many companies allocate budgets for projects isn't very compatible with lean product development. Once the benefits of lean are understood, one might think that the budgeting process could be changed. But yeah, the way that companies (do not) critically think about their established processes is also not very compatible with lean ;-)
Economics to the rescue, a language that companies should understand. Assuming same odds of success for each project, it's way less risky to fund many small projects compared to just a few large projects.
Funny! Some smart guy was quoted as saying that the biggest barrier to communication is the assumption that it has taken place. If you ask somebody if they understand you will rarely hear, "I have no idea what you are talking about."
It's very difficult to communicate something when in most cases, in order to do it right, you need to understand the mental model of the other person, or explain a new —usually simplied— model from the ground. And as the article mentions even then it's hard to succeed, and you can't ever achieve perfect understanding anyway. You would need to be capable of mind control to have others always understand you, and then that's kinda paradoxical. But we will always have that drive, to try to explain no matter who's on the other side. Good work brain.
We usually don't memorize things we see or hear (or say) word for word. We translate them into the meanings and reconstruct them from that. And if we don't correctly understand the meaning, it makes sense that we don't remember it accurately.
I just realize what people take for granted and make it easy to understand.
Everybody in Swizzerland-Austria knows how to sky. Kids learn so soon they do not remember when they learned like most people do with learning to walk memories.
In some Pacific islands they learn to dive. In New Zealand they learn to sail. In Japan or Spain people eat fish by tradition, in most Argentina it is a strange thing to do, you eat meat.
People on HN are mostly hackers, programmers, using a command line, what is a parser is or how to program is obvious for them, but is very strange to general population.
What is normal to us, is very strange to other people raised under other circumstances.
Learn about your audience. Use parables like Jesus to explain what they don't know with things they know very well.
Although it's good to realise "you can't tell people anything", it's also good to be aware that "people can't tell you anything". As in: you're (and I'm) probably not exceptionally special, so we should take into account that we're probably not able to grasp the full picture when someone describes us something, and thus might do well toning down some of our inherent reflexive scepticism sometimes.
This is something I wish people would do when trying to grasp gender and sexuality, especially where it's outside a binary. Too many attack helicopter jokes and "bi people are untrustworthy", not enough trying to understand another person's experience.
I reverse this when dealing with religious people, for example. I don't understand where they're coming from, and I draw hard lines for those with beliefs that are harmful to me, but I understand them better than when I was an edgy atheist teen.
For example, their server ran on five (not four, not six, five) Fujitsu A60 minicomputers, and became hopelessly bogged down after about 80 concurrent users. We were never able to get a clear picture of why. We asked lots of questions and they’d try to answer them, but none of the explanations made any sense that we could puzzle out. They were trying to tell us, you see, but you can’t tell people anything.
Yes, I liked that part, but thought it got de-emphasised a bit when it continued on to say that they didn't really understand the architecture themselves. In this case, I'm sure that played a large role in the Japanese not being able to tell them.
It's not that the Japanese couldn't communicate in English.
It's the fact the Japanese felt, like Asians generally do, they shouldn't disrespect their partner by saying what the partner said seemed liked gobledycook to them.
So the Japanese internalized the failure to understand and eventually did things the way the knew...
The author says you can't explain anything really new, and people have to experience it for themselves. I had an experience like the author talks about when I first "got" the web.
I had read lots of stories about it, and a lot of people were excited by it, but I didn't really see its value. Then I went to a web demo day the local NPR station held in hall with a bunch of computers.
I wandered around looking techy things I didn't understand, and then a public demo started. The guy typed in a url and hit return, and in a bit we were looking at the home page for an art museum in Moscow. "That's nice." I thought.
Then he clicked on a link on the page, and we were looking at a painting at the museum. "That's nice," I thought, but I still was not very excited.
But then he clicked on a link underneath the painting, and suddenly we were at a museum in Paris that had paintings by the same painter.
"Oh my god," I thought, "the potentials for that are just limitless," and thought of a long list of amazing things you could use this for. And now I understood the web.
Learning is about context and we tend to assume others have the same frame of reference. This is why it is so lonely being an expert in any given topic. It is also why certain very commercially successful musicians kill themselves. The better you are at something, the harder it is to find someone to relate to.
Years ago, I was developing a desktop aquaponics unit that I was planning on selling and turning into a business. I know it doesn't sound innovative, but at the time most prebuilt aquaponics systems for sale were large and unsophisticated. My idea was to build a 5-gallon aquaponics system that someone could have on their desk or windowsill that was extremely energy efficient. In fact, it'd be so efficient that only a moderate amount of sunlight would be required to keep it running. I developed a unique pumping system that was intended to require little power and few moving parts.
I told people what I was doing and I was told either "Yeah, I guess that's cool." or "Nobody's going to pay for that! You're crazy."
Eventually, I believed them, and so I quit what I was doing.
A year and a half later, this thing appeared in stores across the country:
It's nearly identical to what I was developing, although its less sophisticated and required more electricity(not that most people buying it would actually care). I was pissed off like no other time in my life. I'm not a violent person, but that one time I went out into the woods and beat shrubs with a stick to release my anger. :)
Looking back, I should have picked up where I left off even after learning that I'd been beaten to the finish line. Still , I felt very defeated. It was heartbreaking to see someone take what I thought was an original idea and make money after I'd spent countless hours building the electronics and testing various water pump/lifter designs.
More importantly, I shouldn't have listened to anyone. The average person doesn't know what they're talking about, which is why they're not coming up with their own ideas, why they elect slick-tongued buffoons into office, and why they're miserable working their lives away for other miserable know-nothings.
If you have an idea that you are passionate about, you're better off trying something and legitimately failing than to have watch someone else live the future you could have had because your family and friends think you should play it safe. Regret is tragic, but simple failure can be recovered from and forgotten once you've learned from it.
I recently quit my job to pursue an idea. We'll see what happens! I did decide to tell people what I was doing, but my previous experience taught me to disregard anything they say, including encouragement. I've been told "go for it" by some and "the gap will look bad on your resume" by others. It might have been a mistake to tell them anything at all because I do believe that exposing yourself to negative ideas can be damaging to your motivation, and same with positive ideas if you become worried about living up to them, but at least I've discovered that I've become a master of not giving a shit about what others think.
Thanks for sharing your experience. I had a similar experience and what is uncanny is my idea was related to hydroponics. After I shelved my ideas, literally a year later I heard radio adverts in my local radio station advertising similar product to the the one I had developed.
At this point in time I have just started a new job and getting up to speed with my day job. A part of me feels there is enough space for many players in the field. We have Dell, HP, Apple. So maybe there is space for your product in aquaponics.
No way! :) I think aquaponics gained a lot of popularity around 2011, which is when I became aware of it and started hammering away at ideas. Maybe it had something to do with that rapture prediction at the time? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Yeah, there's certainly room for more small-scale aquaponics products. Possibly larger scale, too. I had this foolish mindset that if my idea wasn't 100% original then it wasn't worth doing. The reality is that even the biggest of companies that exist today weren't the pioneers of their core products, nor did they necessarily innovate any faster than their competition.
Thanks for the encouragement, and I would say the same for whatever ideas you shelved. Maybe we'll have to join forces some day. ;)
It's even worse for new mediums that you can't experience without new hardware or interface differences, like Virtual or Augmented Reality.
For example I've spent literally hours trying to explain to potential customers over the phone what AR is and how it works, but if I got people to try it, they understand it in about 5 seconds. That was a lot harder to do two years ago than now.
You can tell people and have them understand but you have to know what you're doing.
Most of our ideas about human communication are still in the "alchemical" stage. There are a handful of people who have initiated the rigorous "chemical" stage but their work is not accepted by mainstream psychology. This hasn't prevented diffusion of the knowledge at various rates through various subcultures, but it has grossly interfered with the scientific investigation of mind and communication. I'm talking about the general body of knowledge and technique collectively referred to by the moniker "Neuro-Linguistic Programming" (the other NLP.) Normally I would link to a wikipedia article here but the one on NLP is shit. (It's one of the rare cases when I've found an article about something I know well that is highly inaccurate and biased. It's a bit of an apparent paradox that many people who have trained in NLP still do a lousy job of communicating in many ways, and, ironically, often about NLP!)
In a nutshell, it all started around 1974 when some therapists were videotaped during therapy sessions and the transcripts were studied in light of Chomsky's Transformational Grammar and regularities were detected. Within a decade something like the "operating system" of the human mind was mapped out. As a side-effect, various algorithms and techniques were developed. One example is the "Five-Minute Phobia Cure" which is a simple algorithm that eliminates phobic responses. (If you have a phobia and would like to not have that phobia you should look into this. It's a simple verbal algorithm that any practitioner should be able to lead you through. It only takes five minutes or so, works immediately, and is permanent.)
Anyway, it's the real Information Revolution. I have no doubt that when all is said and done the calendar will be divided into two epochs, before and after 1974, as the discovery of the formal methods by which the brain thinks supersedes in importance the discoveries of fire or atomic structure.
The main point of the article that I got is that people learn by doing.
Procedural rhetoric, pioneered by Ian Bogost, does just that: you simulate a certain system (or you create a game) and people can act in that simulation (or game) to experience the point. In his paper [1] he gives an example of a game called the McDonalds game. The player eventually has to make very unethical decisions in order to keep their McDonalds restaurant alive. The rhetorical point of the game is that McDonalds is unethical.
I find it interesting that project Xanadu is mentioned. The thing is: I have been working on a hypermedia system called XIMPEL. I think hypertext should still be a thing that should be discussed and improved upon, even if it will never be in global use -- for academic reasons. XIMPEL is a bit different though, it is definitely not the best hypermedia system out there. But it is a hypermedia framework in which you can make the quickest prototypes for interactive video and (by extension) for making procedural rhetorical arguments.
I would like to give you guys a demo of it in action, but unfortunately not many quality applications have been made with it (in my opinion). The best one is [2], but it does not show anything about procedural rhetoric and it is partially Dutch. It does give you a baseline application on what hypermedia is supposed to be (and the simple XML language accompanying it, it is meant for non-programmers). Experience it all yourself at [2].
Arguably, I did create an example of procedural rhetoric when I created a Turing Machine program with the language itself [3]. I don't have the money at the moment to spin up a server for it, but here's a video of it [4].
I do want to gauge interest at my university to see if we could make a XIMPEL production regarding the user experience design process. Such a process is messy and different everytime, which requires non-linear storytelling, which is exactly what XIMPEL is made for. Done right, it will be possible to let students experience the user experience design process in a short time (and hopefully get it) before they start to do it. I know one thing: telling how the user experience design process works does not help. It should be experienced. What I wonder is whether we can let students experience purely the process of it.
[3]: The Turing Machine is created with 2 counters. The two counters are represented as stacks through representing the numbers in binary fashion and simulating push and pop functions by multiplying times 2 (push 0), multiplying times 2 plus 1 (push 1) and dividing by 2 (pop). More details on it here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counter_machine#Two-counter_ma...
[4]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NhRtKY0VzQ (until 5:12) -- Note: I made a small mistake at 3:50 but it did not affect the output. In most cases it does affect the output and from mistakes you learn.
I own a restaurant. In the 90s, I actually managed it for six years when I lost a programming job, though I only planned to do so for a few months. The restaurant ran like "a well oiled machine" customers and staff would tell me.
Nowadays, I get irritated when I walk into it and find people don't know what they're doing and inconsistencies are everywhere. I found out our manager was the type that would show you how to do things but not let you do them yourself. Later, when a new person needed to do it themselves, she would complain about their incompetence if they didn't do it right.
My point has always been, until you do it yourself, you don't know how to do it. "Turn this switch on", I'd say. "This is how you stretch this, now you stretch the next 10."
I ran three restaurants back then and had no managers at all. Each employee was better at their job than my current manager is.
No but close. Got back into IT. Wife quit her job to run business. Hired managers but takes a hands off approach. Doesn't want to work in restaurants directly.
I believe this is true for almost every ambitious (maker/engineer). It’s really hard to convince Management about something new because they don’t experience the pain. Sometimes their Job depends on not understanding it.
Probably a reason why Startups outperform big companies in certain niches.
The big dilemma right now is there’s little funding available that can compete with the salaries of big companies. Rents have shot up so high that it’s not easy to take 6 months of to build something so you don’t have to explain. Failure has become expensive.
My theory is that even though people are getting paid more, we’re in this weird paradox of having less innovation.