I am Pedantic.

"When those who question the validity of a relatively new scientific theory are accused of mythical..."

Mon, 28 May 2012 10:01:05 -0500

“When those who question the validity of a relatively new scientific theory are accused of mythical crimes by its supporters, and conversely skeptics attack believers for trying to impose a dictatorship, something other than science is at stake.”

- Christopher Clausen, “Left, Right, and Science”, Wilson Quarterly, Spring 2012

"Hiring well is the most important thing in the universe. Nothing else comes close. It’s more..."

Tue, 01 May 2012 00:26:26 -0500

“Hiring well is the most important thing in the universe. Nothing else comes close. It’s more important than breathing. So when you’re working on hiring—participating in an interview loop or innovating in the general area of recruiting—everything else you could be doing is stupid and should be ignored!”

- The Valve Employee Handbook

PHP: A Fractal of Bad Design

Wed, 25 Apr 2012 15:29:45 -0500

PHP: A Fractal of Bad Design

"Fuck it. I understood it, you understood it, and the worst that happened was that your brain was..."

Tue, 24 Apr 2012 23:28:45 -0500

“Fuck it. I understood it, you understood it, and the worst that happened was that your brain was frowny-faced for a second at having to hear this thing you dislike.”

- A delightful tidbit from my friend Andrew Dupont

"Everything in its right place, one keystroke, one pen scribble, one wineglass, one shoelace, one..."

Sat, 21 Apr 2012 12:56:12 -0500

“Everything in its right place, one keystroke, one pen scribble, one wineglass, one shoelace, one moonrise at a time.”

- I like this turn of phrase from my friend Lora Abe

Facebook's New Model for Business, The Hacker Way

Thu, 12 Apr 2012 18:15:00 -0500

There has been a lot of recent talk, understandably, about Facebook’s $1 billion acquisition of the 2-year-old Instagram. I’ve read a few pundit pieces about the deal, including Robert Scoble’s take:¹

Let’s say that Facebook can turn on monetization on mobile clients. That could mean $500 million in revenue on first quarter, $700 on second, $900–$1 billion on third. Looking at it this way paying a billion for Instagram makes a LOT of sense. Especially when you consider that the mobile team Facebook just acquired is going to be able to build a range of apps.

That seems reasonable under the traditional model of acquisitions, but I think Zuck is actually up to something much more interesting²:

Facebook bought Instagram as a product development hedge.

I don’t think this strategy has ever been successfully employed in a large-scale business. I may be wrong about this theory, but even if I am, I think it’s an intriguing thought experiment.

To understand this, it helps to think of most successful company life cycles like human life cycles: they’re weak and feeble at first, they grow and profit, but eventually they slow down and fail to respond to changes in the market, leading inexorably into decline and death.

There are exceptions, like companies in markets that don’t change rapidly over time³, but I’d argue that Facebook is, if anything, on the fast-changing-market end of that spectrum: Facebook provides a place for people to share and consume information and represent their identity online. There’s no good reason to assume that Facebook as it is today will continue serving those needs over the next several years. Mark Zuckerberg knows this, and has made it part of the company ethos⁴ to avoid stagnation and encourage innovation:

The Hacker Way is an approach to building that involves continuous improvement and iteration. Hackers believe that something can always be better, and that nothing is ever complete.

The general strategy of out-innovating your own death as a company has been tried before, of course, maybe most famously with Google’s 20% time, but I think Zuck has taken it to the next level with the Instagram acquisition: I think he has purposefully taken ownership of a competitor with the intent of keeping that competitor intact, improving, and competing with Facebook itself. If Facebook actually manages to pull off this strange interplay of forces, they will own the Facebook-killer that would have otherwise bested them. Or at least, that’s the strategy—it’s hard to say whether any single acquisition will end up playing out well in the end.

The crucial difference between this acquisition and the traditional model used by everyone from Google to Microsoft to IBM is that Facebook is not assuming that Instagram’s secret sauce can be rolled into Facebook itself, either product-wise or personnel-wise. Zuck thinks that it’s a better idea to have Instagram continue to compete with Facebook until such a later date comes when one or the other’s success obviates the need for this specific competitive arrangement. But, if I’m right, his overarching strategy requires that Facebook continue to acquire, but not control, its competition in perpetuity. It’s a tricky game and one that I’m very interested to see play out.

So was Instagram worth $1 billion? Well, if that purchase helps fend off the eventual decline and death of Facebook itself, it’s arguably worth as much as Facebook could comfortably pay without affecting its ongoing operations. A more interesting question, I think, is how Facebook will carry out this strategy going forward without spending too much money acquiring (and maintaining, improving and out-Facebooking Facebook with) its competitors.

Robert Scoble’s answer to “What was it about Instagram that made it worth a $1B acquisition”
Mark Zuckerberg’s announcement on Facebook
Like Beretta, founded in the year 1526.
Facebook’s S-1 filing, wherein Zuckerberg describes the “Hacker Way”

Thanks to John Tantalo, Adam Keys and Chris Radcliff for commenting on drafts of this piece.

"For the religious idea that a certain book or tradition might connect you up with a supremely..."

Sat, 24 Mar 2012 16:03:01 -0500

“For the religious idea that a certain book or tradition might connect you up with a supremely powerful or supremely lovable non-human person, the literary intellectual substitutes the Bloomian thought that the more books you read, the more ways of being human you have considered, the more human you become—the less tempted by dreams of an escape from time and chance, the more convinced that we humans have nothing to rely on save one another.”

- Richard Rorty, The Decline of Redemptive Truth and the Rise of a Literary Culture

Bret Victor - “Inventing on Principle” An incredibly good talk...

Sun, 18 Mar 2012 12:47:29 -0500

Bret Victor - “Inventing on Principle”

An incredibly good talk on technology and choosing your life direction.

Hacking is Important

Wed, 14 Mar 2012 13:28:49 -0500

Hacking is Important:

One of Rands’s finest.

The New, The Better, The Unknown

Tue, 13 Mar 2012 12:07:00 -0500

Mark Zuckerberg included a letter amidst the Facebook IPO filing which contains, among other things, a description of an ethos I had recently tried to convey to someone about wanting things to always be better, and not being content with the status quo.

It’s not arrogance (as I understand it)—it’s a daring, uncomfortable and often unreasonable push, ever forward. For the same reasons (or un-reasons) that inspired Manifest Destiny and continues to inspire space exploration and kids getting lost in the woods.

Why? Because we want the new, the better, the unknown.

It doesn’t always turn out good, but it will at least be different, which is data for more exploration; more pushing.

Quoth Zuck:

The Hacker Way is an approach to building that involves continuous improvement and iteration. Hackers believe that something can always be better, and that nothing is ever complete. They just have to go fix it — often in the face of people who say it’s impossible or are content with the status quo.

Source: WSJ

Edited to add: I should clarify that I don’t endorse the results of morally objectionable means like Manifest Destiny, but rather am just talking about the impetus for such an action. This desire to push forward, like most things, can go down good paths and bad; it is our responsibility as good people to minimize the bad paths and remain on solid moral footing in pursuit of the unknown.

As you do.

Mon, 05 Mar 2012 19:31:00 -0600

As you do.

Preparing Data for Use in URLs

Sun, 04 Mar 2012 22:59:21 -0600

I like to ensure that any data I have that goes into a URL, like a “slug” for the title of a post, or a real-world option like a brand of car, are considered and prepared for inclusion in a URL before I smash them in there.

For instance, if I had a site that had a database of different vehicles, separated by brand, one might expect a URL like:

example.com/cars/{brand}

In this case, brand will correspond to makes like “Mazda”, “Toyota”, “Aston Martin, etc. The naïve approach would be to just smash those values into the URL:

example.com/cars/Mazda
example.com/cars/Toyota
example.com/cars/Aston%20Martin

But the inconsistency in capitalization and the ugly URL-encoded space character stand out like sore thumbs. Instead, I would prepare these values for inclusion in the URL by making them lower case and replacing non-word characters with hyphens:

example.com/cars/mazda
example.com/cars/toyota
example.com/cars/aston-martin

It seems like a simple thing, but many developers just won’t think of taking a step like this, or won’t bother investing the effort. That leads to a worse experience overall, in my opinion.

Remember: URLs should be designed too, along with everything else on a web site or app, for both form and function.

httpie

Sun, 04 Mar 2012 22:18:00 -0600

httpie:

Human-friendly curl replacement. Lovely.

Raise the Crime Rate

Sun, 04 Mar 2012 10:40:00 -0600

Raise the Crime Rate:

There is a huge problem with prisons and the way ex-convicts are treated in this country—that would be dishonest to dispute, or at least brazenly classist. That’s pretty much the extent of what I was convinced of by this article, though.

How about looking at how other countries handle similar problems, especially ones that face less individual risk and have drastically different crime prevention and punishment strategies? The final charge is laughably unpersuasive, especially for someone who believes in a lot of laissez-faire economics: “In high finance, the laissez-faire approach has proved to be a disaster; for petty crime, it would be a boon.” Oh really?

Better yet, why not de-federalize the issue by decriminalizing most or all of the federal criminal offenses, leaving states to handle them individually? Then at least we might get some experimentation with different models among the states—something that was a feature, not a bug, in the original national design.

I found his recommendations wholly unconvincing, almost to the point of absurdity, and especially in the face of the evidence of tangible recidivism, some of which he cited.

Using Bundler binstubs with RVM

Mon, 27 Feb 2012 15:32:00 -0600

There’s a feature of Bundler called binstubs which will installed bundler-wrapper executables for your gem executables in a directory of your choosing (./bin by default). This makes it so you don’t have to type bundle exec before every bundler-installed gem executable.

The trick, though is getting ./bin added to your PATH only when it’s appropriate, i.e. when you cd into a project that has Bundler binstubs installed to ./bin.

Thankfully, RVM has a built-in hook to add ./bin to your path—well, sorta.

I followed the instructions on that RVM page and found that I had issues with it as an after_cd hook because I use bash aliases that are apparently defined before RVM is fully loaded into my shell. I also think that an after_cd hook is overkill in this case, as you only need ./bin to be added when you enter a project’s root dir, which is precisely where (in my case at least) you have an .rvmrc that is calling rvm use …. This makes it a perfect candidate for an after_use hook:

$ cp $rvm_path/hooks/after_{cd,use}_bundler
$ chmod +x $rvm_path/hooks/after_use*
$ ll $rvm_path/hooks/
total 48
-rw-r--r--  1 bfults  staff   274 Feb 27 14:43 after_cd
-rw-r--r--  1 bfults  staff  1652 Feb 27 15:02 after_cd_bundler
-rwxr-xr-x  1 bfults  staff   280 Feb 27 14:43 after_use
-rwxr-xr-x  1 bfults  staff  1639 Feb 27 15:10 after_use_bundler
-rw-r--r--  1 bfults  staff   289 Feb 27 14:43 after_use_jruby
-rw-r--r--  1 bfults  staff   252 Feb 27 14:43 after_use_jruby_opts

I also changed the script a bit to add some helpful output when it modifies the PATH so I remember that it’s using binstubbed executables. See my modified after_use_bundler.

Lastly, for that hook to work, you need to tell Bundler to explicitly add ./bin to its config:

$ bundle config bin "./bin"
$ cat .bundle/config
---
BUNDLE_BIN: ./bin

The Worst Part of Tech Meetups

Fri, 24 Feb 2012 12:56:00 -0600

Of the many tech meetups I’ve been to over the last 10 years in San Diego, San Francisco and Austin, there is one persistent commonality that always tries to ruin my experience. I’m talking about the shameless conversation derailer.

These people are usually few in number, but they make up for that by monopolizing Q&A time or simply interrupting others at the meetup with their ill-considered and long-winded rants about tangentially related subjects. Everyone else, of course, wants to be polite and avoid an aggressive confrontation, but this simply paves the way for the derailer to continue their campaign of destruction until every person at the meetup simply wants to leave.

The damage from this type of interaction goes far beyond the time they waste in the moment, because other attendees will base their future decisions to attend partly on past bad experiences, and often decide to skip such annoying episodes. I, for one, have stopped attending certain meetups altogether when faced with a recurring derailer problem.

I’m not sure of the best way to go about solving an issue like this, especially in the moment. I know that some derailers are simply unaware or unequipped to self-moderate, so that must be taken into account when we respond. A polite request to move longer discussions to a later time, or a suggestion to turn meandering thoughts into a blog post, perhaps. But we must respond and defuse these situations in order to allow the best parts of tech meetups shine through, which provide innumerable benefits to all.

Technological Progress in Society

Sat, 18 Feb 2012 19:31:00 -0600

There’s an aspect of tech enthusiasm that leads to popular lament of wasted or misdirected skills. But I think the only real way to have an impact on overall industry trends, and thus the focus of collective productive energy, is to start businesses or movements and create cultures within the industry that provide new rallying points, examples and inspiration for other thinkers to riff off. It’s like one big organism where each tiny bit has its own agency, but as a whole the average tends to move toward the most compelling ideas of the time.

On Modern Relationships

Sat, 18 Feb 2012 19:26:00 -0600

During an email conversation with a friend, he remarks and I respond:

I’ve found it notable that friends who might entertain the idea of cheating find the notion of an explicitly open relationship difficult to weather.

I definitely find the same to be true. I think it can be explained with a basic theory of maturity or development in relationships: the naïve or undeveloped are jealously guarded about the status quo in their relationship, whatever it may be. This may just be a manifestation of loss anxiety applied to a high-value personal asset (the relationship or partner), where the person feels judged for their own ability to keep their mate. In this view, marriage is a sort of release valve, where they can end most of their anxiety by pledging monogamy (and receiving loyalty) forever. But the very naïvete or lack of development that led to their anxiety often leads to the destruction of their relationship (sometimes via cheating) because they never learn to grow the relationship with their partner.

This type of reflection often strikes me as tragic with my knowledge of US history, especially considering things like post-WWII soldiers coming back to claim their wives and start their families. They had no reason to believe that locking a wife down and not worrying about it anymore wasn’t the right course of action. As women’s liberation continued in the ensuing decades, American men had the same or similar expectations to their fathers, but the set of possible relationship dynamics was expanding beneath their feet and they were socially ill-equipped for the change. Hence the sharply increased divorce rates and romanticizing about the good old days, back when a man could rely on his wife-for-life to raise his kids and be quiet about it.

The standard narrative is that there’s something wrong with modern couples—that they are somehow morally corrupted or at least lazy, and thus can’t hold a relationship together. But under this alternate reading, it’s clear that people are just trying to navigate new relationship styles with an old set of rules, which are often insufficient and destructive to the goal of shared happiness, gender equality, fulfillment of desires, etc. that have come out of the movement for women’s liberation. I think divorce (and maybe marriage) rates will go down over the next couple decades as people come to grips with their new-found freedoms and figure out how to navigate their relationships successfully, whether with a permanent partner or not.

An API Ontology

Wed, 15 Feb 2012 11:03:00 -0600

An API Ontology

URL turds are the annoying hash (#) marks that get left on the...

Mon, 13 Feb 2012 10:37:00 -0600

URL turds are the annoying hash (#) marks that get left on the end of a URL when a front-end developer didn’t do their job by suppressing the default event on JavaScript clicks.

When you are tempted to use , don’t. Add a click handler to an element that’s not a link—you’re not linking to anything!

URL turds are a pox upon humanity and must not be tolerated.