I haven’t read the whole thing yet, but the structure and format and content-richness is a breath of fresh air.
I miss sites that were about sharing ideas and helping others rather than getting claps.
The only way I could think of making this better was if it was generated from a git repo so that one day if I’m ever worthy of asking a question or sending a suggestion, I could send a pull request. But that’s totally author’s prerogative and I’m happy they shared this in a non junky-way.
This text is not as impenetrable as it first seems and offers some valuable insights on the friction between socially conditioned roleplaying ("packing") vs deep thinking ("mapping").
My best takeaways were:
1. You're not crazy for being a deep thinker: it drives force multiplication
2. Ceremony is very often bullshit
3. You're going to have to make some quality sacrifices in your code - here's a useful model on how to approach that
I also liked the bits about using a step debugger for code reviews, and avoiding nested conditionals. I mostly failed to grasp the camel sex analogy.
It's been ages since I read this, but I remember coming away with a very different impression. "Packing" is essentially storing away details in your memory. If you ever see programmers who write the solution to everything down and then are constantly looking up their notes: that's a packer. "Mapping" is essentially deriving from first principles. It frees up a lot of working memory in your head and allows you to explore the issues more freely.
I think it's a bit more than that, though. Fluency in a task usually means being able to do it without undue planning. When you are speaking, you don't figure out the grammar of what you are saying. You just open your mouth and it kind of pops out. It's that kind of synthesis that's important. It's the same as play chess at a high level or especially playing go. You might not know exactly why one move is better than the other, but your fluency allows you to judge it correctly. To me, that's "mapping". "Packing" is a good strategy if you don't need to judge the value of your work. This is the answer: right or wrong. You can write it down. You can memorize it. You can produce it at the appropriate time. But you can't derive it without a lot of effort.
This writing influenced my thinking a lot, but when I started to get involved with language acquisition, I started to feel that it's a bit limited. I think language/skill acquisition models are actually a better fit. However, this analogy is still useful in certain ways.
I didn't get that at all. The premise of the article is that society, for agrarian/industrial revolution reasons, has conditioned us to be "packers" - reactive cogs.
It implores us to learn from the Japanese post WWII practice of Total Quality Management / Kaizen to become imaginative mappers.
The article strongly divides people into one of the two camps, with frequent Dilbert references and disparaging remarks towards packers as "holding their toothbrush with chopsticks". It strongly criticizes packing as worthless ceremony for the sake of social ritual.
(If you squint hard enough there's also a parable in there about premature API layers and strong typing, but I'll concede that part's subjective).
I'm very curious the history behind all of this, the original author(s), where they are now or where any of this theory went, whose thinking it influenced.
Wow! This is a blast from the past! I'm trying to think... It's got to be 20 years old now. Anybody know if it's been updated in that time? I don't really remember it being quite so long. And for some reason, I remember the background being black or something weird like that.
Edit: Well, from the "unsolicited testimonial": 'On Tue, 2 Nov 1999, Alan Carter wrote' So, I guess I'm pretty close on the 20 year thing :-)
It's been discussed on Hacker News a few times before. There's also a Yahoo group for discussing related ideas: https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/progstone/info with posts going back as far as 1999.
Thank you! There are a few large sections in blue text. I'm not sure if you did that intentionally and I am missing the reasoning. Thought you'd like to know.
Those are in the original too. I'm not yet sure of the purpose either. On closer inspection, the blueness is from an <a> element that wraps the blue text. The <a> element seems to have a CSS class called "taylor" applied to it. Maybe an editorial artefact? Sorry for not fixing that.
I'm not seeing that, but that might be because I'm using an adblocker. I vouch that the site is trustworthy (at least with an adblocker). If you click on the book's title on libgen.io [0] (the primary mirror of Library Genesis [1]), that's where it takes you.
Haha, that's true. Libgen has an interesting interface for downloading, to say the least. Click the blue "Libgen" link in the Mirrors table, and, in the subsequent page, click the big blue "GET" link that's centered on the top of the page.
"There's two ways to approach work: social ('packer') and philosophical ('mapper'). Philosophical is more effective, but your boss is likely to be a packer. Here's some practical tips to understand and alleviate that tension."
Wow! Sending that page to print as pdf (to read in a ebook) was a breath of fresh air, after struggling with headers, sidebars and floats in the typical web page.
Are Internet points more fake than other kinds of points ? Would they be less fake if we had a system to aggregate all the points from other systems (Hacker News, YouTube, whatever other systems award their users points on the Internet) into a single Internet Points system ?
This is as old as a stone. I recall translating part of the essay to Russian when I used to study philosophy as a PhD student back in 2004. https://www.fabmicro.ru/~rz/Progstone_rus.doc
I always think about API/Implementation as Cause/Effect.
Each API will give different implementation.
The things that i learnt is that, i need to spend more time on API usage rather than implementation. With basic API and raw implementation, i could incrementally improve the implementation later.
It should not be to hard to convert the html files to epub using pandoc with a script. Will check later if it is worth the effort. I would also prefer PDF to read it.
I miss sites that were about sharing ideas and helping others rather than getting claps.
The only way I could think of making this better was if it was generated from a git repo so that one day if I’m ever worthy of asking a question or sending a suggestion, I could send a pull request. But that’s totally author’s prerogative and I’m happy they shared this in a non junky-way.