People are getting angry at the math here. I'm Not the OP and have no moral judgement here, but from strict bank account balance perspective it's the same. Persuade me otherwise through addition and subtraction, not moral appeals.
1. I have 10,000 in my bank account.
2. I see a 1,300 record I like
3. I buy it
4. My bank account now has 8700
5. There's 1,300 difference if I choose to buy it or not
1. I have 10,000 in my bank account
2. I have a 1,300 record
3. If I sell it my bank account will have 11,300
4. 1,300 difference if I choose to sell it or not
No "end of the world, this is what's wrong with everybody" gross hyperboles please, I don't care one iota about whether anybody buys or sells expensive records, I don't make any moral judgement whatsoever and would appreciate people in turn not making extreme assumptions about what I think about expensive records. But economically, buying an expensive item or selling expensive item is the same - Prove it wrong with numbers not appeals to emotion please.
> Prove it wrong with numbers not appeals to emotion please
But my point is that I don't care about the numbers. If fact my complaint was that it was made into a financial decision, just because the record happens to be worth $1300.
If it was a $10 record, bought used at $2, then few would argue that you should sell it and make $8. My argument is that it doesn't matter if you could make $8 or $1298, not if you enjoy the record and wish keep it. It's the defaulting to "You could make money" in so many of aspects of life that's starting to annoy me.
It's fine if you want to own and use an expensive thing.
The argument is not "you could make money", the argument is that if you got the expensive thing for free and choose not to sell then you're roughly as "insane" as the person that paid full price. Go ahead and splurge but try not to be a hypocrite about it. It's not lmm that was passing judgement, it was the person that owns the record passing judgement.
The thread started with calling those who buy a record at 1300, and I quote, insane. Argument was made that keeping a 1300 record is equally insane or not. That is the discussion here. It started about whether 1300 was sane or not. It was not turned into that discussion by people who hussle.
It is a massive massive massive privilege of us here to even ponder keeping a record we bought for 2 which could be sold for 1300. For a lot of other population this would be not even an argument.
Again, I don't actually care, but I do believe that mathematically, if one starts with assumption / claim that buying a 1300 record is insane, not selling it is equally insane (or not;). Crux of my argument is that two sides of that equation are equal, not whether we should consider that equation or not. I find it dishonest to make one side of the claim, but go all "modern culture is all about hussle!" When pointing the equivalence of the other side of the claim.
You are assuming symmetries where there are none. I want a thing, discover it's readily available for $1300, that seems insane, so I don't buy it. By chance I acquire the thing from a source that was unaware of its fair market value for $2, amazing deal. I have the thing without having to pay an insane price, I am happy. Now here comes an insane person who wants it enough to offer me $1300. Both parties must benefit from an exchange for there to be a transaction, but the benefit is always subjective to them, depends on public and private information, there's no symmetry in buying/selling, and the equations have inequalities rather than equal signs. Now if the offer is sufficiently higher than $1300, or I know I can find the thing again for sufficiently less, or I find myself in need of the $1298 unrealized gain for other things, then sure, it becomes insane to not sell, but absent such factors refusing a fair market offer at a price you wouldn't ever entertain paying yourself is not insane. Additionally, prices aren't static, platonic things. If someone is insane enough to offer $1300, perhaps they are insane enough to offer $2600 in a year, I will be enjoying the thing in the meantime.
>> You are assuming symmetries where there are none
That's the Crux of the conversation here, with two differing perspectives. I'm not assuming it, I'm putting my perspective forward. and asking either clear disproof or acknowledgement of two perspectives.
My perspective to be clear :
If I buy a thing for $2, somebody offers me $1,300 for it, and it is not worth $1,300 to me, I will likely sell it; or I will acknowledge that it's clearly worth 1,300 to me and not call others who buy it for 1,300 insane :).
(This is the opposite of claiming there is no sentimental value. This is acknowledging that somethings absolutely have sentimental value to me and others are more utility based).
friction and transaction costs exists in our world which are absolutely factors that would delineate the economic utility of purchasing a new luxury item from selling an already owned luxury item.
Spend $2.
Receive album worth $1000.
Make $300 an hour at job.
Have no immediate use case for $1000 in cash.
Have somewhat immediate want for music on that album.
Time to sell album with high quality images/ description, deal with questions from discerning buyers (tire-kickers), post the album: 4 hours
Opportunity cost- $1,200
Sale value - $1000
Replacement album cost - $20
Deciding to sell would put this hypothetical guy down $220 vs just listening to his cool, potential appreciating album and working for the same amount of time.
I don't think it's useful to account for time spent outside of work by the same hourly income as a way to measure how much something costs. By that logic, spending an hour listening would also "cost" $300.
This calculation is faulty because neglects all of the intangible value.
The reason anyone buys anything other than the minimum clothing, food, and shelter for mere survival is because of intangible value.
Any time you see someone who is not opting to optimize tangible value, it is likely that you are simply failing to observe some intangible value.
> Prove it wrong with numbers not appeals to emotion please.
This is a false dichotomy. Intangible value is not some fallacious appeal to emotion -- it is a real thing that economists overwhelmingly agree exists, but also recognize is difficult to put a number on.
Emotionally, it feels different. It's fascinating to see downright angry gut reactions!
A few years ago my friend was selling his expensive camera on Kijiji. I asked him to sell it to me for slightly less as a friendly discount. He told me that's the same as just randomly one day giving me a wad of cash, so why would he do that?? I thought he's crazy and was a little bit offended. Actually maybe a fair bit offended!
It took me YEARS to realize that 1. He's absolutely completely Inarguably correct, and 2. People would find me no less crazy if I adopted same perspective.
Buy for $x, have and not sell for $x, same mathematically. But oh boy will people get instantly riled up emotionally :).
I'd be inclined to pay more for it getting it from my friend than on a second hand marketplace. It removes the chance I'm going to be scammed, or the product isn't as described, or the seller will leave me a bad review.
On the other hand, I wouldn't ask my friend to pay more if selling, so maybe a par price is fair.
If I want a thing gone, for whatever reason I want that to happen, then I want it gone. I never want to see it again.
When I get rid of a thing with eBay or Craigslist or FB Marketplace or whatever this decade's thing is, or with a dumpster, then it is gone from my life. It will never resurface.
But friends have a habit of bringing things back. Whether it's "Hey, remember that camera you gave me?" or "Hey, my old lady is kicking me out -- can I store some shit in your garage [like these four giant rackmount Elo touchscreens that I wouldn't let you bin two years ago]?", things given to friends have a bad habit of coming back 'round.
> Buy for $x, have and not sell for $x, same mathematically. But oh boy will people get instantly riled up emotionally :).
Price and value are not the same. The logic of your friend was basically putting a price on how "special" (or not) he saw your relationship versus some rando-buyer online.
That is why people (close to you) get riled up emotionally: they're being treated in a way no different than a complete stranger.
If you ask your friend for $100 for no particular reason, just because you want $100, that's an annoying request and "no" is a reasonable response. It's not putting a price on your relationship. It's technically the same answer they'd give a stranger, but that doesn't mean you're being treated like a stranger.
(I do think a slight discount often makes sense just because a friend is probably quicker and easier to deal with. But anything more substantial turns into asking for free stuff, and yes and no are both perfectly fine answers to that.)
> If you ask your friend for $100 for no particular reason, just because you want $100, that's an annoying request and "no" is a reasonable response.
If a stranger walks up to you and asks for $100, you're unlikely to give it to him. If a friend does, there's a more likely probability that you will consider the request.
And depending on the relationship, you may expect for the money to be paid back (eventually), or you may not (considering it a gift). (Often the advice is to consider "loans" to family and friends as gifts in practice, as otherwise the expectation of repayment may sour the relationship.)
Sure you'll consider it. The point is you could say yes or no without being a bad friend if their reason for the money is "friendship I guess? *shrug*".
I don't know why so many people are acting like I said a "no" is the only acceptable answer.
That's the thing. This was a $3000 camera. A 20% friends discount is 600. We've been best friends for two decades, but most days he doesn't give me $600 on cash. Don't get me wrong, we don't keep track who paid for dinner or cinema ticket or whatever. But there IS a threshold at which it really becomes a random cash gift.
Yes dealing with friends is nicer than strangers - but also when you're selling stuff, sometimes it's better to do strangers. Expectations of long term service and support are clearer and have more defined boundaries.
> But there IS a threshold at which it really becomes a random cash gift.
Not wrong, but it is also possible that the $600 'cash equivalent' discount would be considered a birthday or Christmas present, or a form of 'repayment' for the time he helped you out with the Thing with the Guy in the Place. (“I'd never been to Belize.”)
I guess friendship means different things to different people. I've had friends spot me plenty more than $600 and I've spent thousands on friends in return. I can't imagine having such an indifferent attitude towards someone I care about.
It can imply that, but it can imply other things too and you shouldn't draw conclusions from one interpretation. You've never just paid for a friend's dinner or ticket?
Perhaps this is a cultural thing. I routinely buy gifts for friends, pay for their meals, travel and vice versa. Having more money is not some supreme objective that is more important than the people around you. Money is just a tool for enjoying life. I come from an impoverished and deprived background, spent years homeless since I was a teenager, and I still recognize that putting money before friends is a scarcity mindset.
"deciding not to give someone a gift out of absolutely nowhere" as a matter of course, as a guiding philosophical principle, is categorically putting money before friends.
I'd say I'm reading into them the regular amount. Your entire premise is that you wouldn't just hand money to a friend for no reason. I challenged this mentality and whether or not such a friendship is ideal, offering a perspective into why there are more important things in life than money.
If this isn't your intent, you should reflect on how you've presented your argument.
To be clear, I don't think either of them is putting money above friendship.
But you haven't explained why you think sometimes saying no is a problem. You said a thing about philosophical principles but I've explicitly told you that's not what I meant. So it's hard for me to make this comparison without knowing what you mean.
Obviously sometimes saying no is a problem. But, the user I responded to, and you to a degree, seemed to, intentionally or not, use this "sometimes" as a lever for "anytime". To be clear, my original criticism is meant for NikolaNovak and his friend's unwillingness to sell something to him at a slight discount. They initially say "slightly less" but later say "20%", I'm unsure which is the real number, obviously the perceived value of a high percentage discount does not scale as linearly.
You replied, saying "Declining to give you $600 out of the blue because you'd rather have more money is not being indifferent," and so I responded to this and your earlier comment, "If you ask your friend for $100 for no particular reason, just because you want $100, that's an annoying request and "no" is a reasonable response," because I disagree with it as framed.
Since then, you have widened that argument to give it more support, and we can now both certainly agree that there's nothing wrong with saying no to a request for money/gifts from a friend. And we can agree it would be annoying for a friend to constantly ask that, or even to ask a single time in certain contexts without sufficient social capital.
I understand your intended meaning might be different than how it came across to me, and said, "If this isn't your intent, you should reflect on how you've presented your argument."
I mean no ill intent and don't want this to devolve into an actual argument, so it's probably best we wind it down. If I came across as judgemental, I apologize, for my part I was attempting to offer my own perspective on what friendship can mean to different people.
"Buy for $x, have and not sell for $x, same mathematically."
Sort of. People are being less irrational than it sounds if you account for transaction costs. There's a lot of stuff I might "sell" if I could point a video-game-like pointer at it and right click and hit "sell", and it just instantly disappeared and money was credited to my bank account. Perhaps even more if buying was just as easy and I didn't need to hang on to something like my drill which I don't use very often and I could trivially "rent" it from the market by buying, using it, and selling in mere minutes.
But in practice one-off selling for anything less than $100 or so is a waste of time because there are significant transaction costs for one-off events like that.
Yes, strictly true, but friendship is worth it, no? Do you spend a couple of hours with a friend and then hand each other bills for the hours? Clearly there was a[n opportunity] cost to both of you, after all. Just spending time together without charging would be like randomly handing over a wad of cash ...
>Buy for $x, have and not sell for $x, same mathematically.
They're not the same.
£20 item to buy, I have £100; buying leaves me £80.
Either, I have £100; not buying/selling leaves me £100
£20 item I own, I have £100; selling leaves me £120.
In the first case maybe I can't make rent now. In the last case I have more cash, but then I need to spend money if I want entertainment/utility that the item had. In the first case I lose 25% of my cash; in the last I gain 20% (this matters when you're sharing your money across different needs).
If you're trying to make rent right now it makes a difference. In the long run it's looking at X income and comparing how much better/worse off you'd be with X-1 and X+1 income, and those two deltas are almost the same. The fluctuation in value of the object will make a bigger difference than the technicalities of buying versus selling.
>>"Domain knowledge can be learnt much quicker than how to apply good engineering principles."
I'm not sure that's universally true. Good software engineers who are arrogant about easily acquired domain knowledge have been the downfall of many an ERP system.
There's SO much IT that's literally all about putting business rules into the system.
> Good software engineers who are arrogant about easily acquired domain knowledge
This is a problem of arrogance, not of domain expertise.
Having worked in a few different industries, I'd wager that for the vast majority of them, a competent person can probably learn 80% of the required domain knowledge in under 6 months. For the latter 20%, as long as the person is not arrogant, they will seek help from colleagues who have been around for longer.
On the other hand, solid engineering principles will take 10-15 years of actually experimenting and learning in practice what makes a system resilient and durable.
The "one big drawback" is the lack of consumer upgrades, and the seemingly arbitrary prices charged by vendors for memory upgrades at time of system purchase. I'm not saying it has to be that way, but seems like it has been so far :-(
I think in late nineties we did this with IPhone. It was a windows app before Apple took the trademark, ran it on Cyrix 586 and 56.6k modem. I think my friends and I were about 17-18? We'd connect with random strangers around the world, then realized We had absolutely nothing to talk about. I imagine it might go better now that I'm not a horribly awkward teenager and have learned some small talk and open ended questions :)
I don't think it's a tax bracket thing, or even necessarily a culture/upbringing thing --> I was brought up white-collar working middle class -ish (Eastern European middle-class, which probably doesn't map cleanly to North American middle class; buying a bottle of coke was a Birthday thing), but then was refugee from a civil war for a while, with the appropriate tax bracket. And my grandma certainly instilled much of the same sense in me :)
Thing is, today, as an adult, I'm painfully aware that I'm mortal and life is limited and time is the most precious resource available to me. I'm not religious so I don't believe in after-life reward for being a good boy either. So I'm a little bit more mindful / little less self-flagellating, than I used to be, about these things.
For myself in particular:
* Yes, I shower and wipe my own bottom :)
* I am the dishes and laundry queen in my family, though I definitely use laundry machine (curious where that would fit in your matrix btw? :)
* I don't mind the act of lawn mowing but I absolutely resent the randomness of it - at some point north american society decided that we/they will 1. Adopt a very specific fast growing grass for ALL the lawns and 2. Having it more than ~5cm long is an affront to man and god and neighbourhood alike. Why they haven't just culturally picked cloverleaf or something is beyond me
* I like organizing my living space but I get zero sense of satisfaction out of vacuuming, dusting, and general maintenance. Many other people love it! In turn though, they probably get zero need to constantly rearchitect their home network like I do :->
In sum - I personally put laundry machine and auto-vacuum in very different category than showers and wiping bottoms, but if you lump them together, much power to you, though I don't think it's a tax bracket thing necessarily :)
The way I see it is: My time is worth $0 unless I'd otherwise be earning money.
So if you're an hourly contract worker, and you would otherwise be billing $100/hr to write code or something, then it makes sense to pay a gardener to mow your lawn and a plumber to fix your toilet, as long as it's less than you're making.
But instead, if you'd otherwise just be doom scrolling on your phone or jerking off, you might as well mow that lawn yourself. Paying someone any amount of money is a waste.
I pretty much DIY everything around the house. I work hard for my money, and it feels lazy and wasteful to just ship it off to someone else to do what I am fully capable of doing myself. Maybe when I'm 80 and have trouble walking, I'll pay someone to move furniture around or wash my roof. But not while I'm able bodied.
> But instead, if you'd otherwise just be doom scrolling on your phone or jerking off, you might as well mow that lawn yourself. Paying someone any amount of money is a waste.
It sounds like you're saying "pay someone to save you time if you use the time to work, but not if you use the time to relax". One of the best possible uses of money is to save you time, no matter what you use the time for.
Mowing the lawn relaxes me. I find it meditative, and at the end I look back at the neatly cut grass and can see what I've done. It provides a sense of satisfaction. It's also a good excuse to get off my ass for a couple of hours and get a little exercise.
Let us understand each other that mowing the lawn relaxes some people, and to others it elevates anxiety and brings the sense of existential dread and time rapidly slipping through our fingers in meaningless repetitive kafkian never-ending tasks required by society for arbitrary unjustified reasons instead :-).
That assumes there is no value whatsoever in doing your own chores. If you want to value time w/friends & family over chores, fair enough, but doing chores is definitely a better & more valuable use of time than zoning out tik tok or gambling etc.
>"My time is worth $0 unless I'd otherwise be earning money."
That's the key insight and difference, and not one we can necessarily persuade each other :). My time is worth a LOT to me. I can use the time to play with my kids, be with my wife, play a video game or a musical instrument, read a book, or even doomscroll, if that's what my brain needs at the time. These are things that bring me joy, and mowing the lawn doesn't. I spend a lot of my time doing things out of necessity that don't bring me joy. I have precious little time for things that do bring me joy. I'm not looking to optimize for things I hate.
Don't get me wrong, as I said, I DO laundry and dishes and cleaning and stupid lawn mowing (grr!) and some repairs etc (I don't even have a rumba :). I used to do more car maintenance myself. But when I do bring somebody in to do the work, I do not feel guilty about it - I work my ass off doing things I'm good at and being paid for it, and in turn I sometimes pay others who are way better and more efficient at something than I am :).
Do you not effectively put a dollar value on things you do for entertainment / personal satisfaction / fulfillment? Pick any two activities, and you can probably identify a dollar amount (which might be infinite) that would induce you to do one rather than the other.
So let's say you're playing a video game, and someone asks you to mow their lawn. How much money would they have to offer you to induce you to do so? That's the marginal dollar value of that video game over mowing their lawn.
Or let's say you're playing a video game, and you need to mow your own lawn, but you don't want to. How much would you pay someone else to mow it so that you can keep playing your game?
Of course, those two amounts would be different because you probably feel differently about mowing your own lawn than about mowing someone else's. The difference between the two should (if you're being consistent, which humans seldom are) be how much would someone have to pay you to mow their lawn instead of your own.
> Do you not effectively put a dollar value on things you do for entertainment / personal satisfaction / fulfillment?
No, of course not. It would be really bizarre to attach a dollar value to something that will not make or cost me money. I value my free time, but I'm not going to pretend there is some concrete dollar value when there is none.
I used to be like you. One day I found out that my oldest daughter was almost 18, and my youngest one was already 13. I wish I had paid someone to have mowed that fucking law more times and played more time with my kids, spent more time with my wife.
Trying to fix it now. But the time I've lost already, this time is gone.
I have a bidet to help wipe my bottom... It isn't enough that I can skip wiping completely, but it greatly reduces that chore.
I sometimes dream of being rich enough to afford a servant to do this for me. But realistically even if I was that rich I wouldn't subject someone to that indignity.
* if that's a sarcastic / troll comment, congratulations, you got me but good :-)
* if it's serious, what in the world do you eat, to compare farming, with AI datacentres, on equal / comparable footing in terms of necessity and efficiencies -- or call farming a "heritage business"? :->
I purchase surplus xeons on ebay, grind them into powder, and mix them into my milkshakes. If you aren't going that route then the real question here is what you're supplementing with to get the necessary computational boost. I'm aware of the complaints that surplus gear has a lower overall nutritional value but you'll see that it's highly cost effective if you can just be bothered to do the math.
Failing to invest in datacenters now is going to mean paying more for the same consumption later. IMO it's best to let the hyperscalers take the hit from the initial depreciation. Sure the alternative gets you cheaper wheat or corn or whatever but that's coupled with an absurdly large premium if you're then blending in brand new CPUs and GPUs.
look, you're having a conversation on a website hosted by a datacenter, right? it's kind of a reductionist point of view. i don't think it's a very interesting question that you're asking, it's bad faith.
there's lots of ways food production is malevolent. the animal cruelty, the worker abuse, not just its environmental impacts.
i don't know. my point is that, this kind of stylistic aesthetic vibes stuff about datacenters is kind of bullshit. i'm not the only one who is saying this. are people in the places with cheap electricity near urban centers that are appealing to datacenters and seeking to ban them also going to ban bad farming operations from their communities? that's a LOT of farming operations! i can come up with some way that almost all farming operations are malevolent. no. they're not going to do that. i don't think they should.
you can have a national policy for this kind of stuff, because the consumers and producers are in different places and our way of geography self-determination is kind of stupid. if it's a market failure because of how the borders are arranged - which happens a lot with environmental stuff especially! - don't let these little bitty communities decide.
Beyond the slowing you to type, the key part of the good books was the considered and mindful order of presentation. This is what had me spending money when I could get the reference manual for free - a guide, a book that taught me unfamiliar concepts in top down fashion, and took some degree of responsibility to be both accessible and comprehensive.
I love the tutoring of LLM, but to this day as a complement to a guided book. I don't find such guided books in computer science much anymore sadly, but for now I still do it in other venues - French, Biology Astrophysics and such. I grab a book, and then use LLM to supplement my reading as my mind always has a myriad questions :).
Not entirely sure why computer science is so radically different - maybe because things change and get obsolete too fast? At any rate, cuddling with a book is still my favourite way to learn a new topic, much as I spend 12 hrs a day eagerly typing and staring at the screen as well :).
Apparently the guy who wrote the Camel book on Perl made less than $1000 from that book. I was shocked when I heard about that because back in the day when I was learning that book was incredibly popular and seemed to be everywhere.
EDIT: Edited, not wrote. My bad. That's a crucial distinction. Also, I meant the Llama book, not the Camel book.
That’s not true. I wrote the Panther book, Advanced Perl Programming, and easily made way more than 100k. Of the 25-30 or so dollars the books cost, I got 10% per copy, or $2 after taxes. The first print run of 35000 sold within the first three weeks.
The Camel book was already a huge bestseller, and was one of the anchor books of the early OReilly series. It made Larry a pretty penny
The 4th edition authors included brian d foy, who said "I think Tom [Christiansen] and I worked for about two years to produce the current edition. I certainly wouldn't want to spend that much time again to make less than $1,000...
It's a huge effort from the editors and proofreaders and the book won't sell enough to make back the effort they put into it." https://www.reddit.com/r/perl/comments/1ns5r9n/comment/ngmvt...
The first edition came out in 1991. The 4th ed came out in 2012, by which time Perl was no longer the duct tape of the internet. Perl 6 had muddied the waters, and Ruby and Rails had peaked.
Still, 1000 is painfully low, esp. for a high quality product.
> Unfortunately even in the old days, a truly good programming book like you’re describing was depressingly rare.
And when you got past the beginner stuff, non existent.
I've randomly tried to improve my $LANGUAGE_I_ALREADY_SHIPPED_SOMETHING_IN knowledge across the years, but if you look at books there's a plateau, and it's not too high.
With the internet, there are random posts here and there with pieces of info that will help you improve yourself. But no books.
You’re better off learning foundational knowledge. Languages are notations, not intent. What has been useful for me are Computation theory, Algorithms, Concurrency, Distributed Systems, Operating Systems theory, Practical system administration, Computer Organization, Networking,…
I do get language books, but only as a reference. For anything more advance, I usually read the sources.
Agreed, Books on specific programming language were indeed tricky.
I found books on architecture, systems, or patterns, were more available. E.g. On relational database optimization principles, or Unix system administration, or graphics algorithms and rendering math, etc :)
> the key part of the good books was the considered and mindful order of presentation.
> a guide, a book that taught me unfamiliar concepts in top down fashion, and took some degree of responsibility to be both accessible and comprehensive
> the tutoring of LLM, but to this day as a complement to a guided book
> I grab a book, and then use LLM to supplement my reading
My sentiments exactly!
People forget that mere data/information without a proper encompassing mental model/framework into which that information slots in to complete the big picture is what education and knowledge are all about. You must see the forest and not just the trees.
This is particularly relevant to CS since there are so many interlinked concepts involved that you can get overwhelmed and drown in the details without understanding anything. Edsger Dijkstra explicitly pointed this out in his EWD340: The Humble Programmer - https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/ewd03xx/EWD340.PDF
If you haven't built up a systematic and holistic mental model then you have not learnt anything. Top-down design and Bottom-up implementation both have to meet for the system to come together.
This is the main reason you need a good teacher or a good book as a stand-in for the teacher.
> People forget that mere data/information without a proper encompassing mental model/framework into which that information slots in to complete the big picture is what education and knowledge are all about. You must see the forest and not just the trees.
should be,
People forget that mere data/information without a proper encompassing mental model/framework into which that information slots in is useless. To complete the big picture is what education and knowledge are all about. You must see the forest and not just the trees.
"considered and mindful order of presentation" -- along these lines my favorite programming book is the Commodore 64 User's Guide, coupled with the reference. I was quite young and found the programming section very approachable. It build on itself in logical layers, and I felt like I had a companion to guide me through the process of learning and understanding. IIRC, I read it like a novel a couple-few times in the process.
> the key part of the good books was the considered and mindful order of presentation
I'd always start with textbooks then flesh out the gaps with internet materials.
I felt "linear learning" from a veteran practitioner gave me a shortcut to how I should store the material and conceptualize the relationships between moving parts. Like surveying the land, putting foundations where an expert might put them, but then I was on my own for what knowledge to actually build.
I've commented on this development before on HN, so I'm glad to see this post on the front page. From a few months back:
"...the fact of the matter is that kids getting into high tech and programming mostly don't read books anymore. How do I know? Recently I was hanging out with a bunch of high school students who asked me how I learned. I said it was mostly via books and man pages. "Yeah, don't sleep on high quality written material. O'Reilly. Wiley. Addison-Wesley. Manning. MIT. No Starch Press. &c...
"Well. You should have seen the look on their faces. I might as well have morphed into the Steve Buscemi meme "How do you do, fellow kids?" They looked at me like I was a total relic or greybeard and said things like "Nah, nobody reads tech books anymore; I learned Typescript from YouTube videos."
This reminded me of the Diataxis documentation model.[1] A lot of what's out there now is the "application" side of the model, leaving the "acquisition" side
unfulfilled.
Exactly. My first computer had 48k, yes K of ram :-). My first PC has 2MB and made all my friends jealous as they had 1MB. Amiga 500 at the time had half.
I am keeping a piece of paper that came with my Tex Murphy game which stated that one could get 32MB of RAM for as little as $700 (1990s dollars) which would drastically improve the game!
I was a poor refugee, but different people take such situations differently. For my family, it was a stern adherence to law and rules, an extreme low risk approach. For others, granted, it was dismissal of law and rules. Certainly, being poor and hungry made us even more averse to conflicts with the law / police / society / system. Again, others drew opposite lessons and approaches.
> stern adherence to law and rules, an extreme low risk approach.
Were any of the people who took risks also subject to deportation upon arrest? I expect they were all USA citizens with less to lose. Genuinely interested if this is not the case, because this seems very explainable if that aspect is different between you and them.
1. I have 10,000 in my bank account. 2. I see a 1,300 record I like 3. I buy it 4. My bank account now has 8700 5. There's 1,300 difference if I choose to buy it or not
1. I have 10,000 in my bank account 2. I have a 1,300 record 3. If I sell it my bank account will have 11,300 4. 1,300 difference if I choose to sell it or not
No "end of the world, this is what's wrong with everybody" gross hyperboles please, I don't care one iota about whether anybody buys or sells expensive records, I don't make any moral judgement whatsoever and would appreciate people in turn not making extreme assumptions about what I think about expensive records. But economically, buying an expensive item or selling expensive item is the same - Prove it wrong with numbers not appeals to emotion please.
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