Jeremy Bentham's revolutionary views on sex - <AUTHOR> http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/jun/26/sexual-irregularities-morality-jeremy-bentham-review

<comment><USER2> The money quote, for me:

 _Sodomy, he argued, was not just harmless but evidently pleasurable to its participants. The mere fact that the custom was abhorrent to the majority of the community no more justified the persecution of sodomites than it did the killing of Jews, heretics, smokers, or people who ate oysters – "to destroy a man there should certainly be some better reason than mere dislike to his Taste, let that dislike be ever so strong"._

It's a shame that Jeremy Bentham's name is nowadays more associated with Lost than the utilitarianism he pioneered. _An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation_ is a good intro to his general line of thinking: [http://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/278](http://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/278)

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes. It's a conventional view now, but Bentham was so far ahead of his time on this that it makes him seem more interesting. That's what's significant about this article. It's remarkable in intellectual history for views so contrarian (and prescient) to be discovered in a major thinker 200 years later.

Unfortunately, the thread quickly went hopelessly off kilter. It's being heavily flagged and we're certainly not going to override that.

<comment><USER3> _It 's a conventional view now, but Bentham was so far ahead of his time_

Bentham was "ahead of his time" only because his intellectual descendants triumphed. If, e.g., the Nazis had won WWII, 19th-century anti-Semites would have appeared "ahead of their time". In other words, it's wrong to equate "being ahead of your time" with "being righteous".

Bentham was also wrong about sodomy being harmless, at least regarding anal sex. Among other things, anal intercourse causes loose sphincters in its recipients and is far more effective at spreading sexually transmitted diseases than vaginal intercourse. (This is a Humean _is_ , though—a matter of fact. It doesn't necessarily justify banning the practice. That's a Humean _ought_ —a matter of opinion.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Excerpt:

 _Bentham was the first major English philosopher of sexual liberty, and it 's about time we celebrated that. "If there be one idea more ridiculous than another," he once wrote about the sexual prohibitions of his day, it was that "of a legislator who, when a man and a woman are agreed about a business of this sort, thrusts himself in between them, examining situations, regulating times, and prescribing modes and postures". Today we are all the heirs of this once revolutionary way of thinking._

</comment><comment><USER5> I would say the current state of the tech world is antithetical to Bentham's views in just about every sense. We, as a group, are massively sex-negative.

Is that why this article is on the top, or because it was submitted by an admin?

<comment><USER6> By "sex-negative," do you mean "negative about gender" or "negative about sexuality" or even "negative about the act of intercourse?"

I can't begin to generalize about my technology peers because they are such a diverse group and because intercourse, sexuality and gender don't affect our professional interactions. From my perspective, it's just that these things are not relevant to the part of our lives that intersect, not that we're negative about them.

<comment><USER5> > By "sex-negative," do you mean "negative about gender" or "negative about > sexuality" or even "negative about the act of intercourse?"

The latter two.

> "..intercourse, sexuality and gender don't affect our professional > interactions...these things are not relevant to the part of our lives that > intersect, not that we're negative about them."

You seem to be of the opinion that it is completely possible to separate the personal from the professional. Yet a lot of us absorbed in the tech/startup world spend the larger part of our awake time (~10 hours or more) interacting with people at work. In such an environment, I don't think it is realistic to totally separate the professional from the personal. Otherwise, you turn the meaning of "personal" on its head for the majority of your working week, if you have to behave "non-personally" for > 60% of the time.'

And actually I think this is part of what I mean to say. The attitude of, "Sex is not relevant in the workplace. Let's be _professional_ about this." Why not, exactly? Why are professionalism and sexuality mutually exclusive? Maybe if we at least explore the possible reasons why people's sexual motivations may cause them to interact in specific ways at work, we can make progress towards making those interactions somewhat positive and frictionless.

<comment><USER6> I'm of the opinion that most people don't need to discuss things irrelevant to the task at hand. I deal with personal life throughout the day - I IM my wife and children for various reasons. I have co-worker friends that I lunch with and with whom I _do_ discuss personal matters sometimes. I do not need to discuss personal matters, let alone sexual (for all interpretations) matters, with my manager, with the other team members, with various other male and female co-workers. It's not relevant to the reason I'm at the office. Ever.

<comment><USER5> Your things are very specific to your situation, yet you yourself easily generalize them to "most people". What about people who don't have wives or children? What if their social circles are mostly concentrated at the office (as often happens with young people in startups)? What if they have a crush on their manager, or their attractive co-worker?

These are real things that happen, and just forbidding them from ever being spoken of is not a very good strategy in my opinion. And I think Bentham's thoughts are very applicable in this regard.

<comment><USER6> Who said anything about forbidding these topics? I simply express a lack of understanding about why such things would be relevant to a place that has nothing to do with such topics. People _want_ to talk about this stuff at work? Fine let's talk. But at some point, we need to get our jobs done. If sex and gender are an obstacle to getting work done (you know, the actual reason we're even getting paid to be in this office), then sex and gender discussions are a priority.

As it stands, they're not critical to doing my job. If you're standing around the water cooler for hours a day discussing football, cinema, the symphony, and/or sex, you're not getting your job done unless you work for a company whose business revolves around these things. Are these things taboo at the office? Certainly not. Are they relevant to the jobs of most people in the US? I doubt it, but certainly I could be swayed by actual data on the subject.

<comment><USER5> > "People want to talk about this stuff at work?......water cooler for hours a > day discussing football, cinema, the symphony, and/or sex..."

Either you misunderstand my point, or you're making a straw man argument. I was talking about discussion on here (HN), not sitting around water coolers in the office for several hours. See how my previous comment has been downvoted without explanation? I'm talking about that sort of thing, reflexive "Ewww, he said _sex_!" behaviour.

> "If sex and gender are an obstacle to getting work done (you know, the > actual reason we're even getting paid to be in this office...."

Well, it isn't an obstacle to work every day, but it can be. You might have heard of the github incident recently, or if you haven't, you might want to read the details.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > In one surviving letter to a friend, he joked that his rereading of the > Bible had finally revealed that the sin for which God had punished the > inhabitants of Sodom and Gomorrah was not in fact buggery, but the taking of > snuff. He and his secretary had consequently taken a solemn oath to hide > their snuff-pouches and nevermore to indulge "that anti-Christian and really > unnatural practice" in front of one another. Meanwhile, they were now both > happily free to enjoy "the liberty of taking in the churchyard or in the > market place, or in any more or less public or retired spot with Man, Woman > or Beast, the amusement till now supposed to be so unrighteous, but now > discovered to be a matter of indifference".

This got a snicker from me. I guess sex jokes really do never get old.

<comment><USER8> "Sodom's real crime was _____" is considerably less funny when you realize a _rape gang_ surrounded Lot's house in the Biblical story. That's not the sort of thing I'm inclined to brush off with a joke.

<comment><AUTHOR> This comment and a couple of others in the thread seem destined to provoke a religious flamewar. That would be off topic.

<comment><USER8> The original article seemed to me to be destined to provoke a religious (or possibly political) flamewar. That's probably why it's been flagged way down to the second page. I was honestly surprised that you were the one who posted it; I'd have thought you'd have foreseen it being problematic.

I did my best to keep this comment targeted at the "rape isn't funny" angle rather than the "here's how I do or don't agree with the Bible" angle -- that is, directed at the offensive concept rather than the religious source. If you have a suggestion as to how I could have better stated it, please let me know.

<comment><AUTHOR> > The original article seemed to me to be destined to provoke a religious > flamewar.

This strikes me as utterly odd. The article is about a major new finding in intellectual history. If Bentham used Biblical language, it is only because everyone did.

That said, your theory of the article fits the data of the thread better than mine does.

That in turn said, a "rape isn't funny" flamewar is every bit as off-topic if not more so.

<comment><USER8> > _" rape isn't funny" is entirely off topic._

... in response to a joke about Sodom and Gomorrah?

Perhaps that's not the topic you originally intended, but as the comments show, the article left the door wide open for it.

> _" The article is about a major new finding in intellectual history"_

It presents that finding in a very poor way.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'll try to respond to the points you've made here and upthread.

I posted the article because it surprised me. Also, of all the classic components of HN, history is by far the least represented. HN needs more high- quality historical articles.

Is this article high-quality? I take it you don't think so, but it seems to me as good a bit of intellectual history as we can hope for from major media these days. It manages to be serious, not overly tendentious, and packed full of information. To pick just one example, the fact that Bentham's writings on sex were kept out of Bentham scholarship as late as the 1960s is remarkable. So I'd say the article easily clears the bar for a good HN post. It's also news, of a sort—a pretty dramatic revelation about a major thinker.

The thread went bonkers, but we should hesitate to overinterpret that. There's a lot of randomness, and the threads are sensitive to initial conditions. It's not hard to imagine a sensible discussion of this article on HN, though the dice came up snake eyes this time.

As for off-topicness, sorry to put this glibly, but yes: responding to something off-topic with something even more off-topic is certainly off-topic. Triply so when it's a fast track to a flamewar.

An on-topic discussion is typically about the specific content of the article—the things that make it stand out from other stories. Going on a tangent is fine if it's something surprising, i.e. if the tangent adds information, like this one did: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7962077](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7962077). But when a thread breaks away from the specific content of a story and makes a beeline for some generality, no information is added. The worst kind of beeline is the predictable ideological tangent. That's not only off-topic, but likely to fuel an agitated argument, and those are the lowest-quality discussions on HN.

So the rule of thumb for on-topicness on HN is something like this: story specifics good, predictable ideological tangents bad.

<comment><USER8> > _" It manages to be serious, not overly tendentious, and packed full of > information."_

Odd. I found it to be lacking in valuable information. There was no indication as to whether there had been any new manuscript discoveries (though the sidebar indicates the writings are being newly published). There was no indication as to anything particularly surprising about his views other than the era in which they occurred. "There was a guy a few centuries back who agreed with modern sexual mores, and it wasn't published because society wasn't open to it a few centuries back" doesn't strike me as a particularly valuable contribution. Obviously some people saw it as such or it wouldn't have gotten so many upvotes -- but obviously others saw it as not belonging.

> _" responding to something off-topic"_

It was a direct quote from the article. In fact, it was _the_ quote from the article that I thought pushed it over the line into flagging territory.

Even so, I'm not sure why you think my response was a fast track to a flamewar. I think my response was measured and calm, clearly explaining why the comment in the original post was problematic, and furthermore adding information people might not be aware of (that Sodom wasn't following modern "not your business what consenting adults do" practice; "rape culture" was alive and well there.) I would expect people reading such a comment to come away with better understanding, and perhaps not be so quick to treat Sodom as modern/enlightened.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> "Bodily passion was not just a part of Bentham's life: it was fundamental to his thought... Of all enjoyments, Bentham reasoned, sex was the most universal, the most easily accessible, the most intense, and the most copious – nothing was more conducive to happiness."

Yep, this is someone who tech nerds can honestly relate with. Easily accessible. Uh huh.

[http://www.damemagazine.com/2014/05/23/amazon-killing-my- sex...](http://www.damemagazine.com/2014/05/23/amazon-killing-my-sex-life)

<comment><USER10> _" The biggest thing, the thing that bothered me the most is I felt like my intelligence was greatly devalued," she wrote. "I am a smart woman. I have a master's from Berkeley in philosophy. My brain is very abstract, though, the exact opposite of so many men in tech who have very concrete/literal brains."_

Hmmm...

<comment><USER6> "...the exact opposite of so many men in tech..."

Sounds like a sexist generalism to me. Maybe she should meet more of us. And while we're flirting with anecdote, perhaps I can take samples from within the population of my little town out in the sticks and demonstrate the same lack of abstract thinking in the women here.

<comment><USER10> I was more struck by the idea that high paid software engineers have the opposite of 'abstract' thinking. I mean programming is all about abstraction piled upon abstraction. Maybe they really they meant something else like 'tolerance for ambiguity.'

<comment><USER6> I'd go so far as to allow the quoted to be referring more generally to tech workers in general, including many that do _not_ function in the abstract.

With regard to "tolerance for ambiguity," perhaps there's a point to be made. I know _I_ have a low tolerance for ambiguity, but I work with male co-workers ( _cough_ sales weasels _cough_ ) that are just as ambiguous about things as anyone else could ever be.

However, I think you've illuminated a point that I hadn't considered: that the speaker meant something other than what was said; that this self-described intelligent individual may have not been clear; or didn't understand how their words would be misinterpreted; or is oblivious to their own misuse of language. And _this_ is usually the cause for so much animosity and/or ambivalence: that the speaker/writer can't be bothered to clarify their intent; that they throw up their hands and declare "you wouldn't understand!" rather than explain themselves; and further that their audience is all-to- eager to castigate them for being stubborn, abusive, obtuse, etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Men and women are sexual beings, no doubt; and sex can be about but pleasure, but also so much more.

Readers here may be interested in studying a somewhat different take on human sexuality, John Paul II's _Theology of the Body_ [1], which "presents an interpretation of the fundamental significance of the body, and in particular of sexual differentiation and complementarity, one which aims to challenge common contemporary philosophical views."[2]

[1] [http://www.ewtn.com/library/PAPALDOC/JP2TBIND.HTM](http://www.ewtn.com/library/PAPALDOC/JP2TBIND.HTM)

[2] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theology_of_the_Body](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theology_of_the_Body)

<comment><USER12> > The ability of the human body to express truth through the sexual union of > married couples is acclaimed. The moral wrongness of using artificial means > to manipulate such a significant aspect of the created body is explained.

Please take a moment to reflect how much damage this type of thinking has done in the world.

This book isn't just useless and misguided, it's positively evil.

<comment><USER13> Just out of curiosity what damage ?

<comment><USER12> Death.

> It follows that many of those who died from AIDS would still be alive today > had the Catholic Church abandoned its condom ban in the 1980s, as it became > clear that condoms were (and still are) the most effective practical measure > to prevent the spread of the disease.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catholic_Church_and_HIV/AIDS](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catholic_Church_and_HIV/AIDS)

Also forbidding sane family planning and the prevention of unwanted offspring, where lack of necessary resources causes even more disease and more death.

<comment><USER14> People undeterred by the catholic church's prohibition on sex outside marriage are unlikely to be reluctant to wear condoms because of doctrinal concerns, I'd have thought.

<comment><USER15> Theoretically, yes, but sadly the reality isn't quite like that. Passion/desire often trumps doctrine, and doing something that one thinks one shouldn't do can have all sorts of nasty consequences, ranging from teen pregnancy to untreated STD's.

Having been an Evangelical Christian and 'assistant teen pastor' in a previous life, I've seen this in action in many different areas of life. People constantly did things they believed were wrong, and the combination of not being prepared or informed about those things and feeling ashamed about it afterwards led to a lot of suffering.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Introducing my wife to programming - <AUTHOR> I am experienced Java developer but I'm not sure whether it's something I should start with or teach her python. She have knowledge about what programing is and she would like to do career change so if you have any tips to share in which direction I should go, it would be helpful.
At the end of the day either web or mobile development is fine as long as she is able to have steady learning curve and less "huh?" moments, until she feel comfortable with whatever hack the programming is :).
My plan is to
1. Tackle OOP fundamentals
2. Introduction in one of the frameworks
3. Build simple apps <comment><USER2> I think #3 goes at the top.

Open an editor and start a python script, , new Xcode project from template, etc.

Then do the minimal amount of work to make a "program". Would be great to have input from the user and output something interesting. But many programs/apps are just informational right?

So you start with the most basic program.

And you add to it.

Occasionally jump over to a huge codebase and show her how editing one line changes the program. Explain how this one just has more layers, time spent on it, more people working on it, all of the above.

Go back to your small programs. Push until you have a real need for OOP or a framework. Then she will be A) interested about OOP or the framework and B) actually understand the point. Imagine someone trying to shove OOP down your throat when you don't have any use for it. Inexperienced people aren't ready for that kind of abstract thinking. Maybe they can understand it but they don't understand the application of it, or worse, they will start to think everything should use it. Show the simple version first, then show how other things can make you work faster and the code cleaners (which are really some of the biggest reasons for OOP and frameworks, right? It's not as if you can't make something happen without them, they just increase productivity and code clarity).

Lastly, making something that scratches an itch of theirs or both of yours so the work is practical. There's plenty of possibilities there to avoid making tic tac toe if no-one likes tic tac toe.

Good luck

<comment><USER3> I think this is quite important as well. A couple of years ago I had a girlfriend that was interested in programming and she started _directly_ making an iOS application.

I helped occasionally when needed as I had 10 years of random programming experience at the time (not in iOS though) but she powered through many issues on her own. While I don't have contact with her anymore, based on her LinkedIn profile she's still an iOS developer to this day, at a /really/ nice company as well.

</comment></comment><comment> d--b My advice: don't do OOP fundamentals. OOP should come up out of necessity of keeping code modular, not as a governing principle.

Building simple apps is the way to go. Don't do web at first, it's too messy. Objective-C is a little harsh as well, so android development is what I'd recommend. It's simple enough to not get too frustrated, and it's good for motivation cause it's cool to make an app for a phone.

</comment><comment><USER4> For all the hate it gets, there is nothing simpler than a small Javascript and node.js app. Easy to focus on one language initially, and if a _beginner_ wants to build frontend stuff, Javascript is the only option.

Guide her through building a simple app of her choice. Teach her how to find answers on MDN and SO, but take time to talk her through big picture ideas and architectures.

</comment><comment><USER5> Do something with Pinterest API Crawl site to find jewelry or mittens or puzzle boards or whatever she likes then analyze it with open cv. Forget OOp altogether for a beginner — it's useful after dealing with large code bases and needing a method to organize code.

</comment><comment><USER6> As somebody who made this career change, do not underestimate how much she has to learn. It's very doable, but there is really SO MUCH. For somebody who didn't grow up tinkering with computers (I didn't, my Dad needed that desktop to write his law briefs so if we messed it up we were in big trouble) there's so much ground work to lay and jargon to conquer that is second nature to people who program but very confusing and new for beginners.

For example, early on when I was just starting to program, somebody was trying to help me use a terminal (a what?) and they said "ok, type L S dash L pipe grep dot txt." HUH? ok, I typed "ls-l," but what's pipe? No no no, it's "L S Space dash. ls is the command." It's a what? It's like software that's already been written that you can call just by typing the name." Oooohhh.

That's just one example. I got it eventually, I got a CS degree and I'm doing distributed systems stuff fulltime, but man those first few months were rough. I remember a friend helping me through what I later recognized as Baby's First Off-by-one error. I remember the victory of writing my first program that worked the first time. I remember the first time a classmate asked a question and suddenly I was able to answer it!

My recommendation to start: write a toy program to do something trivial and run it from the terminal. Like "Hello ___" where you take in ___ from the command line. Learn how to interpret or compile your code from the terminal, learn the basics of variable assignment (== vs =), if statements, maaaybe loops, and go from there.

Never, ever say "It's simple," "It's easy," or "It's trivial." I got very hung up (still do sometimes) on trying to understand what I'm doing from code down to bare metal, and that is NOT SIMPLE, and when you're swimming in unfamiliar terms and confusion it is very hard to articulate a question that clarifies your confusion. And trying to guide somebody into thinking on a handful of abstraction levels without going to far is not simple. Many times I needed to hear "you don't need to worry about that right now" or "just treat this as magic for the moment and focus on this other thing." That is way more helpful and encouraging than "it's simple." I think FizzBuzz is simple now, I sure as heck didn't back then.

Like other commenters said, leave OOP or functional paradigms or whatever for much later. That stuff matters when you realize your one class has gotten super unwieldy.

Don't jump too quickly to Android or web development without covering the basic basics first. Android and web development are not simple and there's some black-box magic that I don't even think some pros fully understand. It is nice to visually see the changes that you're making through editing a UI, but the abstractions can be tough.

This comment got long. In short, be encouraging, help her discern what she needs to know and what she doesn't, and nothing is ever simple because ultimately it's all running on a lightning-infused rock, and these days that rock is probably connected by metal strings or electro-magnetic waves to other lightning-infused rocks, and that's pretty hard to wrap your mind around.

All that said, I know for a fact that she can do it because I did!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for such kind words

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> keep her in the kitchen</comment>


FAQ systemd [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://www.linuxvoice.com/issues/009/faq.pdf

<comment> vezzy-fnord Factual inaccuracies in this FAQ:

a) The conflation of init(8) with one particular implementation, sysvinit.

b) sysvinit actually wasn't fundamentally sequential. A utility bundled with it called startpar had existed for a while to handle asynchronous executions, and was often used by distributions in conjunction with distro-specific hacks and LSB initscript headers to achieve dependency-based boot and other properties. Others simply started processes as background jobs. The wounds were as such largely self-inflicted.

c) The issue of parallelism is orthogonal to that of dependency management.

d) Many people had pined for alternatives well before even Upstart (initng, depinit, simpleinit-msb, eINIT, cinit, runit, minit, daemond, etc.) but were largely ignored in their day.

e) Upstart doesn't actually have a formal dependency model. It's based entirely on reacting to emitted _events_ , which are really a form of runtime postcondition. You can certainly emulate dependencies by doing things like "start on started foobard", but the semantics and mental model for Upstart job synchronization are very different.

f) Opening sockets on behalf of another process is a "clever idea" that is almost 30 years old.

This is ignoring the fact that "Features built on top of systemd are very useful" and "systemd has been proven to work, and it works well - hey, many distros and GNOME are using it!" aren't even arguments.

</comment><comment><USER2> Darn, and here I was hoping for a FAQ on using/administering systemd. Ideally something along the lines of "if you wanted to see what was starting in a runlevel under sysvinit, you'd look here. Under systemd, you look there." "Want to start/stop a daemon on boot? You'd do X under sysvinit, you'd do Y under systemd", and so on.</comment>


Do you really want to be rich? - <AUTHOR> http://blog.cubeofm.com/do-you-really-want-to-be-rich

<comment><USER2> I hate this article.

I hate anything that says "There are two types of people in the world, those that x, and those that y".

I hate it because either:

1) The statements x and y are opposites and combine to be a truism. Truisms are not interesting. (from the 2nd and 3rd matrix) "Some things change, and others don't".

2) The generalization is demonstrably false or unknowable.

In this article in partiular, I found a sort of weird mesh. The second and third category are clear opposites of each other. They are a truism in that you can say "A rich person either will keep on trying to get rich, or will stop after a while." This is roughly equivalent to what these categories represent.

The first category is sort of contained in the second category. Or, more accurately, if someone is going to stop trying to make money after a while, they will either stop because they are comfortable or because they are being looked up to. Not exactly mind blowing information.

I feel that broad categorization of people is useless. People are not either one thing or another. People have features in quantities. Fuzzy logic rules over binary in the world of humans. It would be nice and easy if humans were so simple, but they are not.

<comment><USER3> _I hate anything that says "There are two types of people in the world, those that x, and those that y".

I hate it because either:

      1) ...
      2) ...

_

Irony :)

<comment><USER4> I'm pretty sure he didn't rail against generalization in general, only for people in particular ;)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Yes, of course I do, and the generalizations here are gross and condescending. You will not convince me that I do not want this.

I lean towards the Comfort angle, but I also start tinkering and producing when I am bored, so I could hardly be considered to walk the lazy path. I look for freedom from lower-level concerns so as to begin address higher-level needs. Money provides a layer of abstraction.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow%27s_hierarchy_of_needs>

I am sure someone can link to the study that refuted the "money can't buy happiness" claim.

<comment><USER6> "Money provides a layer of abstraction."

Wonderful way of saying it. Maybe it doesn't quite make sense, but I'm a sucker for applying technical concepts to more domestic concerns ;-)

<comment><USER7> It seems to make perfect sense. Its like storing and retrieving objects in a database. You can do it by hand, but its more of a pain -- better to leave it to something else and use the abstraction: storeData(key,value), retreiveData(key). We can directly map this to nice shirts. Normally one has to buy and iron shirts, which is a pain. (assuming you don't like buying or ironing). Now if you have a lot of money, you can pay someone to abstract that all away. You just look in your closet and grab whatever shirt you want. At the end of the day you just put it in the dirty clothes bin, and _poof_ magically it will appear clean and ironed again in the closet. Money provides the person who abstracts the mechanisms that allow the shirt to exist. We could even do this experiment to harvesting the cotton, producing the shirt etc, which is abstracted away using money as trade for the various levels in the manufacturing.. mmm.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> People here are showing a lot of dislike for the third category, those who want to make money. I think that's because of how the author describes them, not how they actually are.

People who want to make money for money's sake love building things. They can't stand to sit still. They understand long-term relationships, and the smart ones learn that trust and inspiring leaders within your own and other organizations is the only way to keep building.

They love competing, and they love winning. But that doesn't mean they lack integrity, or think lying or cheating is the way to win. They understand that at best that gets you a win in the very short run.

They are the tinkerers of capitalism. And that's why they don't fail you once they can afford a Porsche, why they don't constantly try to impress people because of their insecurities, and why they don't stop thinking about improving their business once they "have enough". Not everyone is like that, but that's not a reason to disrespect those who are.

<comment><USER9> "I'm reasonably happy, but the money's not the point. It's an indication that I've succeeded in the grand adventure of understanding reality." -George Soros

The way I look at it, making money is a great competition because it has the largest and most talented pool of competitors you will ever find. You get to measure yourself against the world, give or take a few people.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I disagree. I think that there are not enough categories.

For example, I've got a comfortable lifestyle, I earn a decent passive income (~18k a month) and it affords me time to work on the stuff that I want to work on.

I'm working on something now because I look at the industry that I'm targeting and I all I see is flaws. The products don't match the consumers wants. I want to fix that and I see a big opportunity eventually.

So I don't match the "don't want to be poor" crowd, because I'm not poor (I'm not rich either) and yet I'm still working on making more.

I don't really care if anyone knows my name. I'm not that vain.

Lastly, while I like the idea of making more money - that in itself is not the big motivator for what I'm doing. I want to build something that changes the game, not because of any external factor other than a personal goal.

Maybe I'm just an edge case, but I don't think you can quite classify everyone into 3 categories.

<comment><USER11> For most people, an 18K monthly income ($216K annualized) that is passive is most definitely considered "being rich".

<comment><USER10> Except that given it could potentially end tomorrow, I am motivated to work on something different.

Sure I have a comfortable position at the moment, but resting on my laurels could be a costly mistake. I am just using this breathing room to work on something that has more potential rather than having to hustle for income... basically forgoing short term gains for long term ones.

<comment><USER11> Fair enough, nothing wrong with that and I agree with your first comment too, just wanted to introduce perspective, because sometimes we all get caught up in where we are and forget that a lot of people are still where we were. :-)

<comment><USER10> That's a fair point too. I often think of where I was a couple years ago (very broke) and it puts everything into perspective for me too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'm sensing a theme from this blog: admiration of narcissists.

There are successful people I admire and emulate, and they are nothing like the "successful" people heaped praise upon by this blog.

</comment><comment><USER13> Yikes. If there's anything I've learned, it's to avoid people in the third category at all costs. These are the guys who see every transaction as a zero- sum game, and the people who will stick a knife in you the moment an opportunity presents itself.

<comment><USER8> Not true. Warren Buffett fits in that category. Many people in that third category care about making money in an abstract sense -- it's a game, but it can be a long-term game. They don't care about the cars or the status symbols. They love building wealth, but not for wealth's sake.

People who don't understand long-term relationships are not actually in the long-term game to make money. Usually they just lack some emotional intelligence. People who 'get it' develop good, long-term business relationships, because they know that to be a successful businessperson and make lots of money you can't just rely on short-term contract-type thinking. You rely on relationships.

<comment><USER14> Treating finance as a game is only an option for those who are already wealthy enough to never worry about being comfortable.

Plus, I sincerely doubt Warren Buffet is likely to give up finance in favor of Chess anytime soon, even if he came to the conclusion it was more interesting (not saying it is, just drawing a comparison.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I'll never do business with someone who doesn't know when enough is enough. This post is saying to do business with greedy people. Kind of sad really, but I'm glad I'm the kind of person the author doesn't want to do business with.

I look on people like this with pity. For them, money is an addiction. They'll do anything for their fix. They'll lie, cheat, steal. Those aren't the kinds of people to do business with, because eventually they'll look to get their fix from _you_.

<comment><USER16> You do business with the people that will bring you a profit. In theory, it doesn't matter what personal views the person across the table has if they adequately provide the services you need. Learn to identify the wants/needs of those people that operate around you and plan accordingly.

Business is about profit, not feeling good about the people you buy/sell services from/to.

Defend yourself if you see a need. Don't avoid people just because you don't get a warm feeling when you exchange services with them.

<comment><USER15> I'm of the opposite opinion. I have the freedom to choose who I work with, who I buy products from, and who I sell my products to. There is a lot of room in the world to do business with people who are considerate, responsible, and of a mindset that I think makes the world a better place.

I've refused to create accounts for other types of individuals on more than one occasion. If they want to use a competing product, that's okay with me. I don't mind losing business from customers I don't appreciate. If someone is a nasty person I don't want them to benefit from the use of my product. Check out some of the firing bad clients threads. Best just not to do business with them in the first place.

It's my little way to shape _my_ world and surround myself with people _I_ appreciate -- that's more important to me than money.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> This article getting to the front page is either an indication of the weaknesses of HN algorithms or the drop of quality of HN users who voted it up.

<comment><USER18> Why do you think that the article's popularity reflects badly on HN or HN's current users?

Sure it's provocative (maybe deliberately so, maybe not), but it's also well- written and engaging. I won't argue about the writing, but engaging should be pretty obvious: almost everyone involved in this thread disagrees with the author, but they're all clearly _involved_ in the debate, right?

<comment><USER17> So if I write an article about how to torture a dog for fun making most to engage in the conversation to voice their disagreement,does this article become a worthy one?is this article suited for this audience?do people gain any insights ?

<comment><USER18> I don't think that your analogy is fair. The blog post talks about different approaches to "getting rich." A lot of people here are interested in this issue. So, the article gets voted up.

For whatever it's worth, I'm have zero interest in getting rich. I wish HN were more about tech & code and less about the money and success. But that isn't a decision I get to make. Having said that, the article engaged me because it made me think about the psychology of people who do care that much about wealth.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I got really angry when I first read this blog post (see my other comment here) and I was thrilled that most people here are as annoyed.

I read maxklein's other story (about how programming is procrastination).

I'm going to give him the benefit of doubt now. To be blunt, he needs to work on how he communicates.

But, I think the gist of what he's trying to say is: there are certain things you need to do if you want to succeed well in business. You have to want to do business (the making money part), but that includes things far beyond programming (for example).

I think I see what he means about working with people who want to make money: they have to be in it for the long haul. But even people who would lose interest when they're rich have a long way to go while they're still (relatively speaking) poor.

You don't want to discount the Woz's of the world just because their hearts are in the tech. If you do, you lose.

</comment><comment><USER18> _It's a lesson that some people will understand, and some won't ever._

I'm curious about this: does anyone who doesn't want to be rich - at all, or not in the correct third way - fall into the group of "those who don't understand"?

I think I understand that if I had a desire to be rich - endlessly, endlessly rich - and not for the things it brought me or for comfort, then I might prefer to work with other people with the same attitude. But is it necessarily the case that if you understand this lesson, then your desires fall into line?

Socrates thought this about being good: if you understand what goodness really is, then you immediately have the appropriate desires. I don't think desire and understanding work this way, generally speaking.

I certainly don't see any attraction in "being rich" as described in the piece, but I don't think that means I failed to understand something.

<comment><USER20> I know several people in the 5 to 100 million range and I don't really want to be that rich. A close friend growing up had 6-7 million in trust fund + a lot more on the way and it was a lot harder than you might think. You don't have enough to "change the world" but working is _almost_ pointless etc. So he took a lot of stupid risks to feel alive and died at 30.

I have that type of personality and while I like taking 6 months off, it gets old and I want something meaningful to do.

<comment><USER21> _A close friend growing up had 6-7 million in trust fund + a lot more on the way and it was a lot harder than you might think. You don't have enough to "change the world" but working is almost pointless etc._

I'm sorry to hear about your friend, but if you ask me, the "almost pointless" excuse is pretty pathetic.

All else equal, being rich gives you strictly _more_ options, and therefore the means to make work _more_ meaningful. At $6m net worth, you own your own time and can work or play at will, in pretty much any industry you desire. Also, your career is going to be much better if you're rich because 1) upper management assumes you work hard because you actually _want_ to do so rather than have to, 2) you get better jobs and projects because people want to buy your family's connections, and 3) most importantly, you don't have the "fear of the boss" that middle-class people do, so upper management sees you as more independent and confident. I've worked on Wall Street at desks that send more money across the table every day than most rich kids' trust funds, and even there, rich kids advance faster, primarily for reason #3.

In the for-profit sector, working is _actually_ pointless for 90+% of people in it, who will never appreciably advance and only go to work because they have to. Being unusually talented or wealthy gives one a chance to not be caught in that trap and to do "pointful" work. So I don't buy into the bullshit excuse that his trust fund made working "almost pointless". Not in the least.

<comment><USER20> I am not saying he made good choices but it's hard to picture all that many well balanced people working when they don't need to.

Let's say you are 18 and make 20k / month and that's the tip of the iceberg you are going to get another 50+ million by the time your 40 even if you do absolutely nothing. Do you really think you would aim for an office job? What's your ROI for "wasting" one of the few thing you can't buy _time_? Are you going to do a startup when you already have more income than your lifestyle requires?

PS: As soon as you realize you don't need to live in an expensive area and most _expensive_ items are more about status than quality you realize money quickly has significant diminishing returns.

<comment><USER21> I wouldn't aim for a traditional office job with that kind of money, but I'd want to be doing _something_. He could go to graduate school, write a novel, start (or at least join) a non-profit.

With a trust fund that can support him indefinitely, he certainly has nothing to lose in taking a job. If it turns out to be a hideous waste of time, he can quit.

One of the intractable unfairnesses of the work world is that those who need or rely on their jobs are destined (all else being equal) to be less successful in their careers, because they _can_ be trapped into a dead-end and because they _do_ have a reason to fear the boss. Your friend, on the other hand, didn't have that problem. He can take a job and, if it turns out to be a waste of his time, quit^ and do something else.

(^ I am not, of course, suggesting that he ought to quit just because a job gets difficult. What I'm saying is that the biggest danger of the career minefield is stagnation and unrecognized toil, in which case one really is wasting one's time in going to work, and your friend had an inexhaustible "get out of jail free" card.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> This is really saying: "partner with people whose interests are aligned with yours". Doesn't matter whether it's about making money, intellectual development or playing on a sports team. The same principle applies.

</comment><comment><USER18> The post from a litle over a month ago is worth a re-read in light of this:

[http://blog.cubeofm.com/programming-is-a-way-to- procrastinat...](http://blog.cubeofm.com/programming-is-a-way-to- procrastinate)

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1124953>

</comment><comment><USER23> What does this paragraph intend to say:

" _For these men we sat with, I spent over 10.000 yuan on the program this evening. I took us to an expensive hotel, I paid the tips for all the girls, I ordered really expensive food. But when we spoke to these men, they never mentioned how much money they had. They never tried to impress me, in spite of me doing all this._ "

That (and the dog meat) bit seem like total _non sequiturs_ to me.

</comment><comment><USER24> I'm not convinced there's a significant difference between the first and third categories. Both are means to gaining status- the difference is just in the audience (the people they're trying to impress) and in the sophistication of how the status is expressed.

<comment><USER25> Sophistication is significant.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> I really like Max's posts but I wish he would elaborate on the 3 types a little further. It seems hard to pigeon-hole every type of entrepreneur/potential partner within these 3 categories (at least as he has described them).

I think I "get" what he's saying (and I definitely concur on type 1–seen plenty of those in my day) but I think it would benefit from more details/examples.

</comment><comment><USER27> Yes, yes I do, but it is really not for the reasons given. I want to control my own schedule. My brother pointed this one out to me, and it makes perfect sense. Having a lot of money, but being bound to the clock doesn't quite sound as fun.

</comment><comment><USER28> You should read "Enough" by John Bogle, founder and former CEO of the Vanguard Group.

</comment><comment><USER29> How strange: the post does not actually give a reason for only wanting to go into business with people that chase money for the purpose of chasing money. It does not explain why the reason that people want money matters. It states a preference of the author, without a single justification.

<comment><USER30> I thought the justification was obvious - you don't want to build a relationship with a partner who will drop out for personal reasons.

<comment><USER29> That is far from obvious, because a partner that's only in it for the money will drop out as soon as he spots a more lucrative opportunity. They are just as much a liability as the other categories: they don't give a shit about you or your goals.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I don't like any of those categories.

1st group: starfucker douchebags, properly characterized by the OP. Prone to serve the "high-status" set they want to join as soon as they have access to those people, and therefore a liability to anyone who wants .

2nd group: contains a lot of clock-punching mediocrities, also correctly portrayed by OP.

3rd group: driven by empty ambition, likely psychopaths. These people are responsible for the "next quarter" mentality that has ruined the US and shaken the world economy.

What unifies types I and III is the narcissistic character of a toxic and dangerous personality. What differentiates them is low (I) vs. high (III) self-image. The stronger self-image of the third set makes these people more dangerous, IMO.

What about?

Group 2+: Those who want to be comfortable, _so they can spend their mental energy on things that are actually interesting and useful_. These are people who wouldn't mind getting rich, but are more interested in solving interesting problems and making the world a better place than in having toy X at age Y.

<comment><USER31> I think the advice about Group 2+ would be "don't partner with them either. They've got priorities other than making money, and making money is hard enough you can't do it accidentally."

<comment><USER10> Not necessarily, a couple of the web's biggest properties came to be from it's founders other priorities.

Google (backrub) started as a research project.

Craigslist started out as a way for Craig Newmark to not feel so isolated.

Wikipedia... the list goes on.

<comment><USER26> How does Wikipedia relate to this at all? It's a non-profit.

<comment><USER32> It may be a non-profit but it does still have people on the payroll, people who get paid to do what they love...

<comment><USER23> And could be raking in millions in advertising dollars, like the non-profit Mozilla, if it chose to.

<comment><USER33> The Mozilla situation is rather different. It's actually two entities: the non-profit Mozilla Foundation ( <http://www.mozilla.org/foundation/> ) and the for-profit Mozilla Corporation ( <http://www.mozilla.com/> ). MoFo shepherd the code, but MoCo do a lot of the business arrangements.

<comment><USER23> I think it's more MoFo sets the direction, MoCo pays the tax.

 _"The creation of the Mozilla Corporation should eliminate some of the thorny legal and tax issues that have been caused by the revenue-generating potential of Firefox and Thunderbird. The Mozilla Corporation will now handle all relationships with commercial companies and its status should allow more flexibility in this area. It is hoped that the income from the Mozilla Corporation will help the Mozilla project (including both the Foundation and the Corporation) to be more self-supporting, though donations will still be welcome."_

[http://web.archive.org/web/20060907025204/http://www.mozilla...](http://web.archive.org/web/20060907025204/http://www.mozillazine.org/talkback.html?article=7085)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> YES!</comment>


The End of Military History - <AUTHOR> http://www.huffingtonpost.com/andrew-bacevich/the-end-of-military-histo_b_663548.html

<comment><USER2> Off-topic. Reddit fodder.

<comment><AUTHOR> Your comments (e.g. <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2530234>) are repetitive, devoid of real content and so don't add much to discussion.

If you believe that this submission should not appear here, feel free to flag it.

<comment><USER2> People don't seem to be getting the point. If I knew where the submitters of links like this were, I'd pay them a visit with a 2×4.

I stopped reading Reddit because of noise like this. I get lectured by pedantic HN guideline-quoters a lot; getting lectured for improperly objecting to guideline-violating content is a new one.

<comment><USER2> What is the point of down-voting the above comment? You partake in petty, gratuitously punitive, anti-social behavior—to what end? Aside from the hard- on you get from your meaningless exercise of illusory power, does it amount to anything? You might as well go to my comment history and down-vote every comment I've ever made, if you're so confident in the righteousness of your cause.

And a single quasi-repetition of something doesn't make for repetitiveness.

<comment><USER2> "Uh, I'm crushed."

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eifZlYwmDj4#t=83s>

<comment><USER2> You obviously have no sense of humor, or you would see the absurdity of what we're both doing.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Hack Day going on now at TechCrunch Disrupt in NYC - <AUTHOR> http://disrupt.techcrunch.com/hackathon/

<comment><USER2> Am I the only one who was struck by the fact that every single laptop in that image is an apple?</comment>


Bus factor - <AUTHOR> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bus_factor <comment><USER2> I've lived through this situation-I lived, but the product died. My boss at the time was the primary developer (really, only developer) of our healthcare web app. He had been hacking on it in one for or another for over a decade. Guy up and has a stroke one morning getting out of bed and dies. Database documentation has no bearing on reality, all of his reporting code was uncommented. All of his programs were 8 character max camelCase names with no (to me) bearing on their function. Product basically died with him-I've kept it running in a zombie fashion, but all new features or even creating new reports is impossible.

</comment><comment><USER3> This works with income sources too. There was a time when 90% of my recurring income depended on one guy. I used to worry about the bus factor.

Now that I diversified, I don't need to worry.

I'm meanwhile trying to reduce the bus factor in my own business, which is just me + outsourcers. I'm documenting what I do and creating processes, and am going to see a lawyer to make a will.

I'm only 28, but if anything happened where either I died or couldn't work, I'd want to be able to hand things off without it being an unusable mess.

(reducing my own bus factor also makes it easier to outsource)

</comment><comment><USER4> I've always preferred the term "bus number". Factor seems to imply multiplication but bus number is really a kind of non-linear subtractive thing.

<comment><USER5> Bus coefficient?

Multiplication could plausibly be involved if the cost to the project compounds with the number of lost team members.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Several companies (IBM included), even countries (Poland of late), learned the hard way to not put the "bus factor" people all on the same bus (or airplane).

</comment><comment><USER7> This came up in a meeting the other day where I asked someone to define technical debt. I instantly remembered the first company I worked for calling it 'being hit by the baby bus'. They were combining the concept of the 'bus factor' with the fact that 2 of the senior people on the project (out of 6 of us total) had babies within months of one another.

</comment><comment><USER8> This is an especially relevant concept in Open Source. It's hard to describe how important writing documentation, clean well-commented code and gathering a community of programmers is for big open source projects.

At elementary OS, we work hard to keep our bus factor healthy, and it should also become a priority on other projects as, unfortunately, we keep coming across "dead" open-source projects because the lead (and sometimes sole) developer of the project had to move their focus to another project or to real-life work.

I wonder, though, if there's an easy way to "measure" a given project's bus factor and would love to know more about it.

</comment><comment><USER9> The story from a different perspective: on my old project, there was a bus factor of 1...and I was that 1.

When I was a new college hire, I thought that would be a good situation. And while it has its perks, it also has many downsides. But the biggest one came when I decided it was time for me to move on.

I wanted to stay with the company and move to a new project. It seemed like a great fit, the new project wanted me...but the director of the old organization told me I had to stay responsible for the old product for 3-6 months before I could formally transition. I had to basically threaten to quit in order to have that number reduced.

If you are in this situation, make sure that either the company is working to increase the bus number and give you some more resources or that the company realizes your importance and compensates you accordingly. I didn't quite realize that my employer saw me as being the critical engineer until after trying to leave. In hindsight it's obvious, but since I started right out of college as a junior developer under people who knew everything about the problem space, my mindset was never "I am the expert", even long after those actual experts had left.

</comment><comment><USER10> If a team has n people, the loss of any of whom would halt the project, does that mean that the bus factor is 1/n?

<comment><USER11> Nope, from the wp article: "The bus factor is the total number of key developers who would need to be incapacitated [...] to send the project into such disarray that it would not be able to proceed"

So: you would like the factor to approach n.

<comment><USER12> You're correct under the definition in WP.

Note that often (e.g. when comparing bus factor of projects of different sizes) it makes sense to normalize by dividing by the size of the team in which case the answer to asogi's question is "Yes, normalized bus factor is 1/n"

<comment><USER13> > when comparing bus factor of projects of different sizes [] it makes sense > to normalize by dividing by the size of the team

Consider two projects, a one-man project with a bus factor of, obviously, 1, and a 100-man project with so much redundancy within the group that the bus factor is an impressively robust 50. The standard bus factor immediately tells us that the big project is much much less fragile.

The "normalized bus factor" you describe (1 for the solo project, 1/2 for the huge project) perversely tells us that the big project is much _more_ fragile, in that it will be disabled by the loss of 50% of the team, while the solo project will only go down after a full 100% of the team is eliminated.

Why does it make more sense to count redundancy by "percentage of the team, whatever size the team might be" rather than by "number of setbacks before project failure"? In general, the bigger team really does make the project more robust, not less robust.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Assuming you are micro independent software vendor (MISV) or one man web shop (OMWS), how do you reduce your Bus Factor?

[http://webmasters.stackexchange.com/questions/55554/what- are...](http://webmasters.stackexchange.com/questions/55554/what-are-the- steps-to-ensure-that-if-you-die-your-hosting-domain-will-live-on)

(longer term I want to put myself out of the equation)

</comment><comment><USER15> Also note the Inverse Bus Factor: "how many developers have to be hit by a bus before a project starts to proceed smoothly?"

[https://twitter.com/voidspace/status/435449949342679040](https://twitter.com/voidspace/status/435449949342679040)</comment>