Marx's engines of plenty

From "Red Plenty" by Francis Spufford:

The problem was that Marx had predicted the wrong revolution. He had said that socialism would come, not in backward agricultural Russia, but in the most developed and advanced industrial countries. Capitalism (he'd argued) created misery, but it also created progress, and the revolution that was going to liberate mankind from misery would only happen once capitalism had contributed all the progress that it could, and all the misery too. At that point the infrastructure for producing things would have attained a state of near-perfection. At the same time, the search for higher profits would have driven the wages of the working class down to near-destitution. It would be a world of wonderful machines and ragged humans. When the contradiction became unbearable, the workers would act. And paradise would quickly lie within their grasp, because Marx expected that the victorious socialists of the future would be able to pick up the whole completed apparatus of capitalism and carry it forward into the new society, still humming, still prodigally producing. There might be a need for a brief period of decisive government during the transition to the new world of plenty, but the 'dictatorship of the proletariat' Marx imagined was modelled on the 'dictatorships' of ancient Rome, when the republic would now and again draft some respected citizen to give orders in an emergency. The dictatorship of Cincinnatus lasted one day; then, having extracted the Roman army from the mess it was in, he went back to his plough. The dictatorship of the proletariat would presumably last a little longer, perhaps a few years. And of course there would also be an opportunity to improve on the sleek technology inherited from capitalism, now that society as a whole was pulling the levers of the engines of plenty. But it wouldn't take long. There'd be no need to build up productive capacity for the new world. Capitalism had already done that. Very soon it would no longer be necessary even to share out the rewards of work in proportion to how much work people did. All the 'springs of co-operative wealth' would flow abundantly, and anyone could have anything, or be anything. No wonder that Marx's pictures of the society to come were so vague: it was going to be an idyll, a rather soft-focus gentlemanly idyll, in which the inherited production lines whirring away in the background allowed the humans in the foreground to play, 'to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind…' Read more →

Homesteading Read more →

How to use a profiler

All of us programmers have at some point tried to speed up a large program. We remember "measure before optimizing" and profile it, and end up (a few hours later) with something intimidating like this and… what next? If you're like me, you scratch your head at the prospect of optimizing StringAppend, and the call-graph seems to tell you what you already know: Your program spends most of its time in the main loop, divided between the main subtasks.

I used to imagine the optimization process like this:

1. Run a profiler
2. Select a hot spot
3. ...
4. Speedup!

But the details were hazy. Especially in step 3. Michael Abrash was clearly doing a lot more than this. What was it? Read more →

The opposite of exponential backoff

Every few days I'm on IM with some coworker from a different building. The conversation goes something like this:

Them: Lunch?
(6 minutes)
Me: Sounds good! Meet downstairs?
(1 minute)
Me: Now?
(2 minutes)
Them: Yes!
(1 minute)
Them: You there?
(3 minutes)
Me: Oops, sorry. Heading down now.

Now I never know whether to wait for a response, or to run down because I'm already late. But today I finally figured out the answer:

Me: New rule. Head down when both of us say 'ready' within 1 minute of each
other.

That's it. No more ambiguity. It's kind of a silly example, but the general idea feels deep, complementary somehow to exponential backoff. Exponential backoff is the ideal game-theoretic strategy for competitive situations where two people need to contend for a common resource, like trying to call someone back after a dropped call and getting a busy signal. Both try to diverge away from a network-defined window of conflict by waiting longer and longer. Here both parties are trying to converge into an agreed window of agreement. Defining the size of the window by diktat should be handy anytime two parties (people, computers, ..) need to cooperate synchronously atop an asynchronous channel.

I'm sure there's a paper on this idea, perhaps something like that one by Lamport ^pdf on Buridan's ass. If you have a pointer I'd love to hear about it.

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Evolution of a rails programmer

Idiomatic rails action for registering a user if he doesn't exist:

After a year of programming in lisp, I find it most natural to write:

Is this overly concise/obfuscated? I like it because it concisely expresses the error case as an early exit; most of the space is devoted to the successful save, which is straight-line code without distracting branches. It's clearer that we either pick an existing user or create a new one. Form follows function. Read more →

My latest project

Two of us have been building hackerstream, a real-time UI for Hacker News that a dozen addicts have been using since March. This won't matter to you if you don't frequent HN, or even if you swing by just once a day. But try it out if you go to HN every couple of hours like I do. You'll see comments on all the stories on the entire HN frontpage as they stream in. You can slice and dice the stream by story or by author. You can even set it up to highlight, say, all comments by security guy Thomas Ptacek and all comments about today's silicon valley brouhaha. If you use Twitter the UI will seem familiar.

Is such a firehose useful? Is it too much of a good thing? I find I see more of HN for the same time investment, and I waste less time scanning stories I've already read. What's more, when I started using it I found my comments getting more votes and more responses. It turns out the biggest factor affecting responses is not how good my comment is but just how early it shows up on a story. By biasing my reading to be more timely I was giving my few comments improved odds of a response.

It's not for everyone, but hackerstream is geared to help you have higher-quality conversation on Hacker News. Try it out and tell me what you think.

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Backup theory for startups

You run a startup. Your company has been given data by users, data that it would be embarrassing to lose. You make backups. You're aware of the best-practices:

Make backups.

Make backups automatic. Or they won't happen.

Make backups yourself. Outsourcing them is for suckers.

Regularly restore from your backups. A backup doesn't exist if it's never read.

Incomplete Read more →

* *

What do Moody's and the patent office have in common? ^[0]

They're in the business of fielding complex applications from just about anybody. They can't just pick the best ones—they must accept or deny every last application.

This is a really bad situation to be in. To understand why, put yourself in the shoes of an employee at the patent office^[1] who must judge these applications.

Half-assing

Each application you see has its own deep complexities and needs time and expertise to understand, perhaps even expertise you don't have and experts you must track down. But when you're done understanding one application you haven't learned anything that helps you process the next one faster. Your supervisor is shielded from these complexities and inevitably judges you on the basis of one metric: number of applications processed.

Inevitably, employees in this situation employ a heuristic: they try to race through the simple applications, and half-ass the complex ones. There's now an incentive for poor applicants to craft complex applications; if your idea stinks a simple application is certain to be denied, while a complex, weighty-looking application has some chance of randomly being granted. Meanwhile, genuinely complex applications now face more randomness and may be undeservedly denied.

Bike-shedding

Over time applicants complain, usually the deserving but complex ones. Every time you the employee catch heat for such a complaint you loosen your constraints. Complex applications get handled more and more perfunctorily.^[2] Instead you spend more and more time with the simple applications, probing them intensely for weaknesses, ‘bike-shedding’ them in more and more adversarial fashion, looking for the vaguest of undeniable reasons to deny applications. After all, the acceptance rate is going up in that complex pile. The denials have to come from somewhere, lest you stand out in somebody's metrics.

Predator vs Prey

Over time applicants start to notice that even genuine applications have more chance of being granted if they are large and complex and seem weighty. As more and more applications grow complex, standards change. What was complex 10 years ago is now considered simple, and more likely to be denied. Nothing's being read in any sort of detail anymore. Every applicant wants to end up in the complex half of the pile. They aren't antagonistic to the application process anymore, but to each other. You the employee are now in a position of power, like a lion in the savannah, culling the herds of their weakest, least weighty-seeming applications. Your prey isn't trying to convince you of anything anymore, just to outgun some other application.

Red Queen

It starts being taken for granted that ‘you have to spend a month on the application,’ no matter how clear and deserving it is at the outset. “Standards” go up. You have to pay a lawyer to craft it. The number of lawyers, the expense of the lawyers, the armies of paralegals, everything's spiralling up, until not everybody can afford a patent anymore. Like the Red Queen, everybody is running as hard and as fast as they can just to stay in the same place.

Well, not everybody has managed to stay on the treadmill. The one thing that's been lost is the line in the sand showing a good patent application.

Zoom out

This dynamic has played out throughout history. It is how bureaucracies are created. To some extent it is inevitable; humans don't yet know a better way to deal with complexity. If you're planning an application process, be aware of these pitfalls. Consider ranking rather than judging, so that you don't have to grow your employees with the number of incoming applications. Consider some sort of limit on application length and complexity so that you don't have to grow your employees faster than the number of incoming applications. Think hard about how your employees will judge applications. Consider bounties for finding misjudged applications. Any of these ‘outs’ will help you avoid the worst-case scenario: high costs, which grow faster than incoming applications. Read more →

Don't apologize

As a teenager it drove me crazy that my father would never apologize to me. Ever. Even when something was obviously his fault. I swore to myself that I would be more intellectually honest_i, that I would admit when I was wrong. That emphasis on intellectual honesty gave me a scientific bent and took me to engineering college, and to grad school. For 12 years I unquestioningly assumed the virtue — and importance — of intellectual honesty. Coincidentally, I also spent most of those years working alone.

Now that I've worked in teams for a while I'm starting to change my mind. In many social situations being apologetic sucks. It makes others around you feel awkward. If you're leading a team it makes you seem weak. If you're the rookie you sound like you're making excuses. If others aren't intimately familiar with the details it can magnify your screwups and make things seem worse than they are. And always it's a distraction, diluting your focus and that of your team. I'm learning to not apologize until it's clearly expected. Better to err on that side.

All this may seem crazy obvious to you. Apologizing isn't really part of western culture. I can remember others telling me dozens of times, "don't apologize." Somehow it never sunk in. Perhaps it's not even an eastern thing, just a personal fetish.

Looking back, I have a different perspective on my father. I realize he was an army officer who spent much of his day telling subordinates what to do. You can't be apologizing in that situation. You just don't think about whose fault it was, because the entire focus is on adjusting to a constantly-changing situation, and on what needs to be done next. I want that mindset. Read more →

The anti-roles of Romanticism paraphrasing Morse Peckham

The Age of Enlightenment in the 18th century weakened the grasp of the church over society, and tried to replace authorities like God, church and king with critical thought. Enlightenment led to the Age of Revolution, primarily the American and French. But the French revolution seemed to expose the failure of the Enlightenment's worldview, one that could cause both utopian liberation and tyrannous oppression. It felt like a new Fall of Man. The world lost its value; life lost its meaning; the individual no longer had grounds to reason about right and wrong. Those who articulated this dissatisfaction were the early Romantics, and they ushered in a new artistic, literary, and intellectual movement. In the process they created several iconic anti-roles that we still recognize in popular culture.

The Byronic hero

The Byronic hero appears as the wanderer, the outcast, the Wandering Jew, the mysterious criminal whose crime is never explained. The tremendous appeal of Byron's poems throughout Europe and America shows how widespread was the feeling of malaise.

The Visionary

The Visionary was the first stage of recovery and the first positive Romantic anti-role. The word often used at the time was “mystic.” The Visionary tries to observe the world so intensely as to get to the essence outside of all mental categories. It was felt to be the special task and privilege of the artist and poet to communicate that experience.

The Bohemian

The Bohemian is perhaps the most modern of the anti-roles, characterized by a fascination with alcohol and drugs and sexual experimentation as ways to shift and change consciousness, put the mind through permutations of perceptions which are impossible for the square who is boxed in by his social role. Similar is the interest in non-bourgeouis modes of living, in indifference to middle-class standards of dress, furnishing, and cleanliness.

The Virtuoso

The Visionary avoided role-playing; the Bohemian defied it; the Virtuoso and Dandy transcended it, the one by fantastic mastery, the other by irony. Paganini was the first great Virtuoso and for decades the anti-role model and ideal. Other examples are Richard Burton the Virtuoso traveler and translator of the Arabian Nights, and the Virtuoso mountain climber who performs sublime feats of superhuman effort “because it was there.”

The Dandy

The Dandy transforms the role not by excess but by irony. The role of the highest status in European society is that of the aristocratic gentleman of leisure. By willfully playing this role better than those born and trained to it, the Dandy reveals the pointlessness of the socially adapted. The social type with the highest status spends his life in play and pettiness. The Dandy instead offers perfection and elegance without content, without social function. By stealing the clothes of society, he reveals its nakedness. He demands a greater exquisiteness and perfection than society can achieve. This explains the irritation of society with the Dandy, its efforts to deprive him of his ironic authority, the moral nastiness with which England relished the downfall of Oscar Wilde. Read more →