What To Fix

You are standing on the thing you seek to criticize

2012-05-10T12:06:50Z

(This post is not about religion) A few years back I got the chance to read David Bentley Hart's defense of Christianity, "Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies", and he made a point that has stuck with me to this day: society eventually embraces concepts that are foreign, only to have people stand on top of the results of those concepts centuries later to denounce the entire effort. I'd call it stupid, but it's so pandemic that the phrase "crisis of education" seems more appropriate.

This is a laughable example, but this kind of thing is rampant

And so we have people living in a modern world, provided for by capitalism, which while amoral is not stupid and doesn't normally do stupid things, telling us about the evils of capitalism -- in tweets sent from their iPhone. We have people buying "pure" products without chemicals in them -- not aware that chemicals are an irreversible part of being alive. We have people not wanting to vaccinate their kids -- not realizing that the only way you could rationally be able to do that is in a world where everybody else vaccinates.

We have people ranting on and on about the bad things democracies have given the world -- not realizing that freedom of political speech is the very reason they're able to rant. We have people ranting on and on about the dangers of a security state -- without honestly acknowledging that being protected from dangers to democracy is the very reason they're allowed to rant. (I abhor the security state, but that doesn't mean that there are not honest and logical reasons for it, or that all counter-intelligence efforts are bad, just that we've went way too far with our application.)

I personally criticize the social nature of science -- where popular ideas get funded and unpopular ones get shunned, and sometimes it takes a generation dying to get closer to the truth. I hate the herd mentality and the activist scientist. I think they cause harm to science itself. But many take the human vulnerabilities of science to make a case that science is itself mostly worthless -- that everything in the world is just a matter of belief. They say that believing in gravity is much the same as believing in divine providence.

Everything is not the same. Bedrock principles are not there by blind luck. We've tried other ideas and they didn't work at all. This is an extremely important thing to know. We have learned a lot about how to allow humans to live, love, and have a meaningful life over the past several centuries. Picking out principles for having a dynamic economy or a vibrant scientific community isn't like choosing a flavor of ice-cream at a dinner buffet. Yet vast swaths of people -- people with six-figure incomes and college debts -- think it is. They haven't been taught the critical thinking skills or given the testicular fortitude to make cultural value decisions. And so here we are.

This convenience of belief is even more evident in identity politics. The Irish in America were treated like hell, until things got better. But do you think they'd stick up for the African-Americans? Not a chance. Once their lot improved, they left the African-Americans to their own defense. Would the blacks stand up for the Hispanics? For the most part, no. How about the Hispanics standing up for the LGBT community? Again, mostly no. In fact, I'd argue that in general the group most recently stigmatized are often the worst at doing the same to others. Time for a little payback.

Everybody seems to love to argue principles as long as it's their group. Once it's not their group, the principle doesn't seem to matter so much any more. Yet it's the application of principles that allows the conversation that society needs to evolve. Instead of understanding that certain principles allow for most any kind of government where progress and freedom can occur, we pick up principles are if they were convenient clubs to beat each other over the heads with until we get our way. We stand on the very thing we seek to criticize.

This is from people who mostly consider themselves well-educated and knowledgeable. Don't get me started on the ones who don't have the benefit of a higher education. I'm not going to go down that road. Why? Because the highly-educated group spends much of their time looking down on this group! It'd be a comedy if it weren't so tragic.

I am not saying that this is a black-and-white thing. That some concepts are all pure and need no criticism at all. Far from it. I'm saying the exact opposite, in fact. Yes, the way we have implemented many of these ideas have hurt a lot of people.

But there's no sense of proportion. An idea like freedom of speech might cause great good in the world and have a .0001% failure rate. Yet we denounce the entire concept when it suits us. Laugh at the British Muslims above if you like, but many of us do the same exact thing, just with lesser-understood principles. We get away with it because of rampant ignorance. We're just as idiotic, just not as obviously so.

We are living in a generation raised with no idea how to separate political invective from serious conversations about how systems of people work.

Personally I don't want to see the human race repeating the same mistakes over and over again, so to me this is a terrible tragedy. I can understand that many political leaders would feel otherwise. But we'll never be able to fix something if we don't understand which parts of it work and which parts do not (and more to the point, why).

Battling the Borg: a Startup Idea

2012-05-07T14:42:04Z

Last month I joined Pinterest. I kept hearing these stories of how many people were already on it and how fast it was growing, but I really had no idea of what it was.

Turns out Pinterest is basically online scrapbooking. People collect pictures and share them. It's like the picture part of Facebook without the status updates.

As I started adding pictures, it occurred to me: how many more social networks am I going to spend my time filling up in my life? I think about all the content I've posted on Facebook, Google+, Twitter, and now Pinterest. Tens of thousands of words. Hundreds of pictures. All sitting on somebody else's server where they're going to make money from them.

I'm not angry at these companies for making a buck, their use of the material is fine by me. But it occurs to me that 1) Much of this stuff I end up posting in multiple places, and 2) Since I'm the one doing all the work here, perhaps I should have better control over what I create. For instance, I don't even know if it's possible to retrieve all the material I've put on Facebook.

So I created a little blog just for Pinterest, I Heart Us! It's about things I like. When I find myself wanting to pin something, I first blog it on I Heart Us! and then pin from there.

That way all of my stuff is in one primary place. If next year a new Facebook killer comes along, I can simply reuse the stuff I already have.

This got me thinking -- why am I permanently creating any content for third-part sites? Do I really want the things I've created online scattered all over the place? Why not make a plug-in for Chrome or something that allows me to keep everything I type and share in one master place? Conversations, blog posts, pictures, replies on threads, things I've read -- it can all go in one place. Then if somebody wanted to know how I felt about gun control or something, they could simply go there.

Sure, it's not for everybody, but I think a lot of people would like something like this. Might be something worth pursuing one day.

I'm Giving up Quitting Things

2012-05-03T16:11:59Z

Dear Internet,

First there was Hacker News. I've been a member for many years and I was going to quit, but after thinking about it a long time I've decided not to quit.

Then there was Facebook, the program that the devil himself spawned. It uses our friends as marketing tools against us. I also was going to give that up but decided at the last minute to resign from quitting.

Now I'm looking at you, Google Plus. I would resign from your service as well, but upon further reflection I've decided to stop leaving.

I'm completely giving up on quitting things.

I know what you're thinking -- Daniel, please think about it some more, surely you can find it in your heart to not stop quitting things on the internet.

But I cannot.

All I can ask is that my good friends who are quitting things would think twice. Now is the time to quit quitting, before it's too late.

Paycheck-stub.com - 10 Years of Tedium and a Punch in the Nose

2012-05-01T14:12:46Z

Had a friend about a year ago tell me "Man, you're living the dream!"

Couldn't help but think of him as I started yesterday on refurbishing hamburger-casserole-recipes.com. Eight thousand visitors, and the site makes like 20 bucks a month. If this is the dream, I should have asked for an upgrade.

But some things about the startup life are pretty cool. Like my conversation with the Intuit people yesterday regarding paycheck-stub.com. Over the past two months, I beginning to look at a sales level of over 50 people per month. People visiting the site want payroll services. At that level, it's like there's a little bell ringing. My startup is calling me. Hello! Daniel! Do you see this? Are you paying attention?

Who knew?

Surely there's another opportunity there besides a one-time commission. 50 people a month looking for payroll? 50 new customers a month for any kind of business is a pretty big deal, but what about add-ons like accounting services, payment services, business loans, or tax compliance?

Yesterday afternoon Julie from the Intuit Service Provider program told me that yes, that was a pretty large amount of sales. They could get me in on the ISP program if -- and this if ironically tragic -- instead of sending people to an Intuit landing page I had people complete a form and had somebody call them back. She said if I were able to meet my sales goals for the site I stood a chance at being one of her top performers.

They say that war is 99% boredom and 1% abject terror. I don't know about others, but my experience with startups has been 99% monotonous tedium and 1% YCombinator. One day after ten years of trying I fully expect somebody to come up to me and say "Yes, but you're smart. It was easy for you."

I plan on punching this person as hard as I can directly in the nose.

50 sales a month from a direct click could easily become 5 sales from a landing page. Or it could become 100 various other kinds of sales. And of course the punch line goes like this: if my vendors require me to construct my site such that the only people buying stuff don't care about brand, then why am I associating with a brand? The crowd speaks. I must listen. This isn't a jazz band or a kindergarten trip. It's a business.

Julie seemed like a sharp cookie, though. We're going to run the numbers for a month or two and see how it goes. I continue to be amazed at the amount of data well-constructed websites can generate.

But if at the end of the day paycheck-stub starts becoming a cash cow? It wasn't because of clever planning, a great team, or some trick of marketing. It was because I wrote 30 other websites around topics from foot care to funny pictures. Startups, like finding a job, is a numbers game. You don't get to pick what people want. All you get to do is increase your "luck surface area" so that eventually when people want something you'll be there.

I think when success comes for many of of us it doesn't sound like a reporter calling from TechCrunch. It sounds much more like a mundane and pedestrian conversation about the tolerance rating of drop-forged iron widgets or something like that.

So it makes me laugh when I read about startups on Hacker News that are inventing teleportation systems or making facebook enhance your sex life. For every one of these amazing VC-backed adventures, there are 100 guys making pencils more shiny, rocks heavier, and giving construction workers iPads. Yes, even telling people trivia about paycheck stubs. The culture around startups and the actual life of startups are two completely different things.

Must-see Space Video

2012-04-28T15:24:45Z

Ran across this today during my morning reading: Sander van den Berg has taken live video from various planetary space missions and made a video from them.

Really cool stuff. Great soundtrack also.

Outer Space from Sander van den Berg on Vimeo.

Personal Operating Systems

2012-04-25T12:09:11Z

We are thinking about the cloud completely wrong.

Think back to the first computers. If you had a program to run, you had to manually flip a bunch of switches to put the program into the computer's memory. Over time, people started automating that process. First came cards, then tape, then discs.

The same goes for storing things. Initially, if you wanted to store something, you wrote it down. Then we started using all those other mediums as well.

But being able to run a program or store something is not what made computers useful. What made them useful was a unified way of running programs and storing things, the operating system. Somebody came up the bright idea that if we had one common way of storing things and one common way of running programs, people could write all sorts of programs and store all kinds of things without having to worry about whether you had tape attached to the computer or a disc. An operating system allowed storage and operations to be abstracted for both the user and the programmer.

Today when we talk about the cloud we're still talking storage, and it's still very much a game of which "device" you use. Google Drive has some features, Amazon EDS some others, Dropbox still some more -- access models are all over the place. If you want to write an application for a computer using one service, it's going to look a lot different than if you use another.

But even then -- thinking about writing an application -- we're framing the problem backwards. It's not the computer we should be thinking about, it's the person. What's happening slowly over time is that we are merging with the computer. When we store something -- say a copy of a song we just heard -- we want it to go away somewhere. It doesn't matter where, and it doesn't matter who the vendor or what the service is. We just want it stored. And when we want it back whenever we feel like it. It doesn't make a difference to us where we are or what devices we have around.

Likewise when we want the computer to do something for us, say monitor for new emails, render a cool ray-traced image, or check the status of a project, we don't care where those cycles are actually performed. We just want it done. Humans have a need to store stuff and run programs, not computers.

Right now people are still in switch-flipping mode. I get a new song to play and I have to make sure it's on Dropbox, or make sure it's copied to Google Drive. I have to set up a sync between this service and another. I'm always have to screw around with all the details of saving things and running programs.

But that's not the way it should be. The computer should be molded around me, not the other way around. We need a way to universally abstract away all the details of storage and processing so we can have more time to be human.

We need a personal operating system.

An Open Letter To Virginia 5th District Representative Robert Hurt

2012-04-17T03:05:22Z

On tax day 2012,

Dear Congressman,

I'm writing you this for two reasons. First, due to circumstances out of my control, there have been times in my past where I have owed more than 50K in federal income taxes. I feel horrible about it, but I made amends as best I could. I served in the Marines, and I'm not about to let my country down. These things happen, especially when you are self-employed.

I read today, however, that there is new legislation proposing to prevent international travel for those owing sums like that. As a consultant, some of my clients are overseas. For people like me with international clients, they could easily get into a spot where the government prevents them from traveling overseas in order to pay back the money that the government is owed. That's crazy. It is in neither party's interests for the law to be structured like this. People who are flight risks will just leave. I don't understand what the point here is, unless it's to further stress people already in a bad situation. Surely because somebody got sick or you had a family crisis it isn't the time to further stress them, is it? Remember -- we're not talking tax fraud or evasion. We're simply talking about people who owe money. Not even that. About people the IRS says owe money.

But the second reason is more dear to my heart. I simply do not understand my country restricting travel because of owing money. To me, to restrict freedom of travel is like taking away the ability to own a gun or vote -- it happens, but only under dire circumstances. Perhaps if there was some criminal aspect like tax fraud or tax evasion, I could understand it. But simply because the administrative system says so? Where are we living again?

When I was 25, due to a mistake the State of Virginia made, they thought I owed 20K in child support. In actuality I owed nothing. After four years of chasing them around, I finally made them reimburse me for everything they took. But let me assure you: they did everything they could during those four years to make my life living hell. They ruined my credit, they garnished my wages and my taxes, they hurt my reputation with employers, and so forth. It was a nightmare.

And now we are seriously considering giving the federal government more ability to hassle people along basically the same lines? Have we thought through the public and sometimes tragic impact this is going to have on real people? Just wait until little Susie needs an operation in Britain but her parents can't go with her, or marines sent to combat aren't allowed to go because of tax responsibilities. Or -- heaven forbid -- one of the Administration's staff that owes so much on taxes isn't allowed to travel with the president. The false positives will be legion. It's a PR nightmare waiting to happen.

I don't know if you're much on constitutional law or natural rights. I used to read quite a bit on it. This law fundamentally changes the nature of my relationship with my government. Up until now if I didn't like things I was free to leave. Now my government is telling me I am no longer free to leave, and it's not because I have committed a crime or am some kind of danger to others. It's simply because they think I owe money. I love my country and I have served my country. Unless I am guilty of some crime, I do not understand my country telling me I am no longer free to leave. This is not the country I was born in.

We don't have debtor's prisons any more, and we don't put people to work at hard labor to pay off creditors. This is a terrible idea not because of my personal story, but because of what it says about the people's relationship to their government. As Reagan said, It used to be that the people told the government what it could do. We are entering an age where the government is actively and aggressively telling the people what they can do. It's about much more than my sob story: this is structurally very bad and sets a dangerous precedent for the republic. Please listen! If you lose consent of the governed, it doesn't matter how good your intentions were.

Thanks for your time and for listening to my story. Best of luck in your Congressional career.

Daniel Markham
Virginia

P.S. No mailing lists, please.

Note: For those Americans living overseas, including people who were born in the U.S. but have never lived here, the bullshit is even worse. We have truly created an insane nightmare of a taxation system and no amount of increased enforcement is going to make it any better.

The Site I don't Promote

2012-04-16T13:17:55Z

This article makes me a hypocrite. I'm telling you about a site of mine -- promoting it, basically -- and at the same time telling you that it's a site I don't talk about.

Hopefully this will make sense to you by the end of my story.

I have a lot of sites and apps. I think somewhere around 30 or so. Most I am very happy to pump, like my funny picture site, my site for talking about paychecks, or my site for my e-book series on practically applying Agile in your team. But this site is a special case.

A couple of years ago, I wrote about what many are now calling "technology addiction" The problem is that many web sites are using psychological, social, and gaming tricks to pull readers into more engagement than they would naturally give. Facebook is a great example -- it uses your own friends to suck you into the site. But there are others. Instead of a place for textual information that links to other textual information, the web is becoming a few addictive sites doing anything they can to get you to stay and/or click on ads. That's not where we wanted to go, and it occurred to me my problem can be restated like this:

There is a finite amount of text I want to consume from the web each day. Perhaps I scan 30-40 editorials. Instead of chasing down these editorials on various aggregation sites, then clicking through and using something like readability to remove the graphics, it's in my best interests to have a computer assemble all of these in one place in plain text format. No ads, no graphics, no commenting, no nothing. Just the text, please. That way I can consume much faster. Over time, perhaps I can train the system to order this list. Also it would be nice if it all was client-side so I could continue to consume without an internet connection, say on an airplane. Using AI to reduce the article size to a paragraph or two would also be nice

And so newspaper23 was born.

Newspaper23 isn't much to look at. It's really kind of a dull app with all that plain text and all. That's kind of the point. But I've been using it daily for over a year now, and each time I upgrade I make a little tweak to it. Right now it only provides opinions: sports, religion, politics, world, science and miscellaneous. And it doesn't count voting (although the only graphic I allowed myself was a neat voting animation) or reduce the article size. But I could expand. Add voting. Do some Bayesian ranking. But I remain conflicted about the app.

Why? It should be pretty obvious to most startup readers. Alarm bells should be going off. Web content providers do not want to provide me with content like that. They do not want me using first-click, or readability, or any other kind of tool to get just the text of the article. They want to build a walled garden and have me come and play in it. Perhaps stay there and poke around. Play a game or two. Exactly the opposite goal that I have. I don't blame them. After all, creating these sites requires a lot of work. And I have no desire to hurt anybody or upset the apple cart. To me, the only thing I've done is automate a bunch of clicking I was already doing.

Yet the problem remains: this is a useful app which many people will not like.

I remain very conflicted. On one hand this is not something I want to promote to a mass audience. On the other hand this is something that I have found very useful and I am sure many more people would as well. But they'll never get the benefit unless I say something about it. It's an app many will like and many will be uncomfortable with -- and these could be the same people!

My current solution is to make this into a club for people who, like me, have attention-span problems on the net. I'm not sure if this is satisfactory. But it's the only thing that makes sense right now.

I hate both to talk about this site and to not talk about this site. Hence it's the site I don't promote.

Dear Future

2012-04-09T13:45:53Z

Dear Future,

I thought it was important to write this to you because no doubt many of you will wonder what happened to technology between the years of 2000 and 2015. How did something with so much promise turn into a tool to monitor and control the population?

I wish I could say that there was one bad group or another that we could blame. This would make it much easier to explain. We certainly have a lot of bad groups at the moment. But instead of evil actors, most of the people who destroyed our individuality, privacy, and freedom were acting out of a spirit of helpfulness and kindness. This made the disaster all the more tragic.

Take Mark Zuckerberg. Brilliant guy, great observer of human nature. He noticed that people like sharing little tidbits about themselves, so he created an addictive site where everybody came and shared most everything about themselves. Or Sergei Brin and Larry Page. They noticed that by using certain ranking forumlae they could provide people with what they were searching for on the internet. They didn't start out to own all the data on the planet, including data most people would have considered private, that's just where they ended up. After all, a search is a search. "They want Google to tell them what they should be doing next," said the CEO.

Governments initially had a hands-off policy towards the internet. Let's see where it goes, they said. But after only a decade or so, it became apparent that people used and valued the internet more than they used and valued governments. It had become a part of their daily lives in a way that government never could. It was only natural that as political things happened on the net -- secrets were stolen, criminals moved money around, people were tricked out of their savings, protest movements formed and took off -- that governments wanted in on the action. Way in.

The police, who up until now had to actually figure out what was going on around them using limited resources, saw all this technology as a wonderful tool to find and prevent crimes. They could track you without a warrant. They could ask cell companies for your conversation information without your knowledge. They could monitor each detail of your life in an automated way. It was as if instead of the local town having 20 policemen, it had 20 million. It was progress, after all.

People who had jobs that had no purpose any more -- and this included a lot of people -- wanted governments to help them keep the old world they were used to. So they petitioned for laws to restrict the kinds of thinking that went on inside the net. No passing around crypto tools, no copying certain pieces of data, no mentioning of certain things. Some sites were okay to visit. Some were not. Some thoughts were okay to express. Some were not.

None of these groups saw themselves as hurting humanity. Each was willing to make a small compromise, heck, not even a compromise, just progress, in order to continuing doing the good things they were already doing. Because people already generally supported these groups to one degree or another, the population was suitably prepared not to realize the danger. Some were fiercely worried about bad corporations but less concerned about government. Some were worried about government but less concerned about corporations. Some feared foreign governments. Some feared organized criminals and terrorist but weren't so concerned about corporations and governments. Each had their groups that they defended and their groups that they feared, but very few realized that it was the combination of all of these that was the danger, not just one group or the other.

In fact, it was our desire to identify bad actors and evil groups to hate that made us blind to the changing world. We kept focusing on the intentions and motives of outsiders, which ironically enough were mostly benign, and trusting our sacred cows to defend us, which also ironically they were woefully unprepared to do. We looked outward at others Instead of instead of inward at the general impact on each of us as a person, which was insidious and pernicious.

It was just our way of solving problems. Political rhetoric was full of all sorts of fear-mongering about dangers that, while important, were not of the same caliber as the (I hate to use this phrase) paradigm shift in the nature of humanity that was happening. It became difficult for most citizens to discern the difference in levels of danger. Was the fact that some people may not like other people of a certain ethnicity worse than the fact that most of the population was having it's online behavior tracked by multiple entities? Was the country going broke at the same level of danger as embedded, locked-down-by-vendor computer implants? Was terrorism more important than preventing the government from effectively controlling all business travel? One person yelling about one thing on TV was much the same as any other. It's not that nobody identified the danger. Quite the opposite. People identified too many dangers. We were awash in people telling us about all sorts of evils and dangers.

It became very difficult for the average citizen to prioritize. At some point, most people just gave up. Like a cancer patient waiting for a particularly difficult operation, or a passenger in a jumbo jet huddling frightened in the back as it rides the great storm, we maintained an outward air of calm. There was nothing else to do. It was so difficult to get our head around that we effectively gave up ownership of it. All that remained was a blind trust that somebody, somewhere was figuring all this stuff out. That the market, or my political group, or my favorite software company, or my clan, or technological progress in general, or whomever. Somewhere somebody was fixing it.

Only it didn't work out that way.

Men at sometime were masters of their fates. The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, But in ourselves, that we are underlings.

Anyway, I thought I'd let you know how it all happened. Since the victors always write the history books, I'm sure that no matter how it turned out you are happy and assured that it was the best way for everybody. That it was the only solution that would work.

We here in the past are not so sure.

Rethink your Startup Website: Make a Net, not a Funnel

2012-04-03T09:31:06Z

Everybody tells you to build a funnel for your startup website. That is, have 1,2, or 3 pages that serve to take the site visitor from reading something that interests them to buying/signing-up for your product.

They are wrong. Here's my experience.

A few years ago I wrote a small site called paycheck-stub.com. The potential traffic looked good, and I thought it might be fun doing a site with paycheck trivia. Since the topic was money-related, perhaps there were some people visiting that wanted to buy something. Specifically I was thinking about those payday loans you read about. You know, you look at last week's paycheck stub and think "Gee. Sure would be nice to borrow 50 bucks before next payday." My working theory was that people were looking at their paycheck stub and wondering what kind of loan they could get from it, what was their paycheck stub good for?

So armed with this theory, I completed the site, and sure enough, a year or two later I had a lot of visitors. The only problem is, they were not doing what I expected them to do. People were visiting, poking around a bit, then leaving. I had placed a couple of loan ads, but got very few takers.

Confused about how so many people could visit and still I was clueless about what they wanted, I logged on to the Hacker News IRC channel and asked the room "Can anybody help? I have a site I don't know what to do with."

After a very interesting sidebar conversation with a guy for about an hour or so -- no, I am not trying to trick anybody, yes, I am always interested in making the content better, etc -- we came up with a list of six or seven things people visiting the site might like.

"But there's no way I can code all of that up based on the traffic and income of the site," I moaned, "I have enough material here to spend the next three months trying things out, and the return from the site simply isn't worth it."

"So don't do that. Just make some buttons with these items on it. When pressed, record it over in Google Analytics. Then you'll know more about what people are looking for."

So I made buttons. One button said "I want to create a fake paycheck". One button said "I need a payroll system". One button said "I need a loan" And so on.

Bingo. This simple idea, turning around the workflow from push-based to pull-based, changed my entire site and the way I think of sites in general. You see, like most startups, I really don't know what people want, I just know what I'm offering them. I can't construct too much of a theory about what they want and spend tons of time developing on my theory. Instead, I have to get some feedback from them as I go along. Otherwise I waste a lot of time and resources.

So the best thing to do is to engage first, covering as many of the angles of things people might be interested in as possible, then instrument the hell out of it. This was the beautiful thing Facebook did when they started. They didn't want you to do anything but what you wanted to do naturally, they just wanted to pay close attention and help. The money comes later.

Now if you visit the page paycheck stub sample, I know that you'll most likely read the entire page. Half the time you'll go onto another page, usually "Example of a paycheck stub" Why? Because you are researching the format of a paycheck, that is, you have to make a paycheck for somebody and are trying to figure out how to do it on your own. Any click you make, including outgoing links, downloading templates, clicking on ads, or going off to Amazon, I'm watching. I'm carefully listening to your side of the conversation. In fact, I want to give you lots of options and watch what you do. That way I can learn more about what to provide you. Because of what I've learned, I'm able to remove most of the Google ads and just provide a link to a couple of nice online payroll systems. As time goes on, more and more ads disappear and more and more links for what you want appear directly in the text. That makes the site cleaner, more informative, and more naturally-flowing for the reader.

Every startup I have ever read about has to pivot at some point, change direction. If you're thinking in terms of a funnel, the only thing a web presence is going to give you is a headache. You'll know people leave at some point but you'll never really know why. If, however, you're thinking in terms of a really slow and difficult conversation, a net, then you have a shot at listening instead of talking so much.

Make a net, not a funnel. Funnels say you know what people want and are measuring how good you are at getting them there. Nets say you have no idea what they want and are interested in what they have to say. Once you are making something people want, then make a funnel. Until then, make a conversation.

Dead Programmers Aren't Much Fun

2012-03-31T12:07:37Z

Two years ago my step-dad died. He was fine up until close to the end, so the family came down and he took us on a tour of his things. There was a truck, a car, some tools, and things that had sentimental value. More so than a will, this was more a tour of his physical possessions; where they were and what to do with them.

It got me to thinking. Today I'm doing something most of you older programmers out there should do as well: I'm sitting down with my oldest son to talk about where all of the family's "digital inheritance" is.

You know, that partial app you wrote five years ago and put on GitHub, the one you still get emails about, what's going to happen to that? Or the web site about dancing turtles you created that makes five dollars a month from AdSense. Should that stay up or be abandoned? What other choices are there? Or how about what you're reading now? Perhaps you have a blog out there that you spent a few years tinkering with. Maybe nothing serious, but still, you spent a hell of a lot of time with it. Is it all just data to be deleted? If not, where should it go?

Who moves it? Where do they put it? Who controls the content? Who receives the income, if any? Who responds to any emails?

What happens to your email account after you die, anyway? You don't want to shut it down immediately -- there are correspondents that may only write once a year, and it might be important for somebody to respond to them when they do.

Source code on places like GitHub should probably be flagged. Something like "This person is no longer alive and the project will probably receive no updates." So should blogs -- no matter what else happens to them. People deserve to know that the person they are reading is no longer with the living. This might also be a good idea to do with professional forums, such as HackerNews. If a person has spent many years contributing to a social site, there are probably people that want to know if they're gone. At least you'd hope so.

How about social networks? I'm starting to see family members log on to Facebook accounts and post something like "Joe died last night in his sleep. A memorial service will be held ...."

That's nice, so somebody should be sure to do that. Then what? Leave the account active? Delete it after 90 days? If you're a programmer it's certainly possible you might have some pre-canned scripts to run -- perhaps telling nephew Susie she should have a great birthday and life once she turns 18. Maybe you have something to detect jokes your Uncle tells and add in a "lol" in a comment. Aside from being weird, is that socially acceptable? Should relatives help you do this?

The pieces of a digital life are a lot more complicated than a physical one. When my step-dad took us for a tour, it was a very easy thing to do. If he would have died suddenly, we still could have made do by simply showing up at his house, reading his papers, and wandering around. We live in a different age. All his possessions were static. They just sat there. The things I create often interact with real, living people -- without my having to be alive for them to do so. And they are all invisible. Sometimes hidden. Picking up digital pieces is nothing like sending a car off to auction. Yes, right now programmers and tech people are ones feeling the pain, but we're always the outliers, the ones who get to these problems ahead of everybody else.

Are you going to spend money on life insurance, writing a will, and making final funeral arrangements only to leave a digital disaster to some poor family member who is both technically unable and unaware of how to handle it all?

Don't do that.

ADD: Some folks are offering up sites that store information and/or send emails upon your death. Thanks for this, but I don't think they're going to work for me. Being a programmer, my stuff is complicated. I have several domain registrars I've used, for example. Programs can be in various languages. From time-to-time I've used pseudonyms. Sometimes proxies or key files are required to get to certain assets. Different source repositories were used, and so on. To simply access all of my stuff, it's more like setting up a complex development environment from scratch. You have to write a script and then test it out. A simple email or a list might be missing key details that seemed trivial at the time but is impossible for the reader to figure out. And it's not like anybody can ask you questions if your email doesn't work.

Great idea, though. These various services are doing a great job for what they do. Perhaps they'll evolve as time goes on to cover more paycheck-type items (ie, complicated and purposely difficult to access and configure) and less email or to-do-list-type items..

The Player

2012-03-28T09:23:44Z

In the 90s I was consulting with a company and we all decided to take negotiation classes. One of the exercises involved pairing off. Although nobody knew it, everybody got the same instructions. In each pair one person got a card saying he had a truck to sell and couldn't take anything less than 5K, the amount of the remaining car loan. Another person was told he had 7K to spend on a truck. Each was supposed to get the best deal they could.

At the end of the exercise, we all compared results. Some people just shared cards with each other. Many times they just split the difference at 6K. Some sellers, however, managed to get the full 7K out of the buyers. The guy behind me, though, was incredible. His partner sold her truck for 2K -- three thousand below what she owed on it! When asked, she said they had made a deal where he would come by on weekends and help her earn money using the truck so she could pay her truck off. Heck, she stood to make tens of thousands of dollars!

Everybody wondered the same thing but didn't say it: once you sell the truck, what's going to guarantee you're ever seeing him again? And even if he does come by, how could you ever make up such a difference?

He was a player.

Years later I was being courted by a very small consulting shop in the DC area for some work. Discussions had gone well, but I could tell they wanted to seal the deal. So they brought in the owner for a breakfast.

I was sitting in a coffee shop and in walks a multimillionaire, dressed in a very expensive suit, obviously very busy and very successful. For the next hour, he focused completely on me -- what my goals were, what are common interests were, the potential for future business, the things he would be happy to teach me.

I signed on the bottom line. Never saw the guy again.

Players are people who think that once they figure out the magic phrase to say to motivate you, they can make you do what they want. What happens after that is not important to them. They play people like a video game. You'd think such behavior would be limited to big, important stuff, but I've found that the size of the deal isn't important to these people. they're in it for the game.

Had a guy a couple of weeks ago who flattered my writing and my e-book, said he was going to purchase a bunch of books, then asked me for a favor. I was so happy I immediately said "Sure! Whatever I can do to help!"

He never purchased anything. Probably never even read anything I wrote. But he got what he wanted.

Another guy runs a popular blog. He asked if I would blog about a favorite topic of his and in return was going to mention my blog on his site. I was happy to help him. Sounded like it was good for both of us. But of course although I wrote the article, he never mentioned me.

The thing is, after a while you can see a player coming from a mile away. It's totally obvious. The easy smile, the reliance on charm, the painting of word pictures, the going from zero to maximum interest in what you are doing.

The uncharitable thing to do is think that these people are fake. I do not believe they are. Some are really busy, some are simply easily distracted. They have skills -- some might call it a curse -- at gaining people's trust, and they have learned to lean on those skills to cover other personality flaws.

Instead I've come to admire and kind of feel sorry for them. Sometimes they do great in life and never stumble. Sometimes they go for a short time and then fall. Many times they get into a situation where it seems like they are always running from some self-caused disaster. Sadly many addicts become players simply as a survival response. The really good players start feeling as if none of the normal rules apply to them, which leads to trouble. I think former president Clinton was a player. A master.

To the last player I met I simply said, "I am happy to help you, but you are not going to do these things. Why worry about telling me you will? Here's what you want. if feel like doing something in return, do it. No obligations."

A funny thing happened. It was like my calling him out on it made him worse. He went on at length about how he did what he promised, how important it was to him to help me out, and so on. Of course, he never did anything he said he would. But my calling him on his game somehow made him almost desperate. It was like he had to trick me in order for him to feel some kind of satisfaction from our interaction.

I admire the skills and am fascinated by players, but I don't think I would want to live with any.

Admittedly, I have friends which I keep asking for favors as well. Stuff like reviewing books or helping me edit an especially tricky email. But I never promise them anything. So that makes me a "moocher" -- much better than a player. (grin)

The Test: Civilization at a Crossroads

2012-03-22T11:54:07Z

Civilization is at the crossroads facing a great test. Technology is pushing us into areas where mankind has never gone before. Old social and governmental structures are slowly ossifying and crumbling. The rules are not only changing, the entire game is different.

People are beginning to figure out something is changing, but they seem completely incapable of figuring out what exactly is broken or how to fix it. In places like Libya and Egypt they are actually having a shot at changing the whole shebang. I imagine such change may come to the rest of us, and soon.

Change is mostly good, but without a theme of design, an idea of why things work the way they do, people will be unable to figure out how to make the future work. They just make the same old lame mistakes over and over again. When you look at a 300-year-old institution, you may see something broken and in need of replacement, but there are also really good reasons why it lasted 300 years. Too often we get people wanting to tear it all down -- which very well may be required -- without having any idea of how to replace it except for maybe something they saw on TV or heard a politician say once.

Computer systems architecture, organizational architecture, and studying history has taught that the reasons why something works is more important than the thing itself. But we live in a world where people are excellent at being upset while failing miserably at being very good at all at describing why exactly things are the way they are. Any good lawyer could argue any point one way or the other and the average listener wouldn't be able to create much of a counter-argument at all -- except for maybe providing emotion-laden, poll-tested talking points by way of rebuttal. The cable news channels are full of talking heads doing just this.

Here's a list of a dozen or so principles that I would want most people to know going forward.

Being wrong is the most important thing a government can do. Elections and the regular change of power allows governments to be wrong and adapt.

More control and government should happen locally, less far away. If you want gun control, social health plans, and all sorts of other great ideas for improving our life, you should be able to do that at the local level. People who disagree can move to another town if they don't like it. The structure of what happens where is critical. We need to separate what problem we want to fix from where the best place to fix it is. The structure question is much more important than the policy question.

Being able to speak freely and persuade others is the critical part of recognizing failure and moving forward. It is especially important when people say hateful, angry, ignorant, bigoted, or ill-advised things. Nothing should interfere with free speech and the free flow of ideas

Computers are an extension of people's minds, not devices like a record player, typewriter, or printing press. Intrusion into somebody's processing and data should be treated the same as intruding into their thoughts. It shouldn't be done.

Nothing should interfere with people being able to assemble in public or online to organize political parties or ask for redress of their grievances

You can't form a governmental system based on certain people being better than other people. If everybody is wrong and making a unscientific or stupid decision, it's better than making the right one that most people hate. Consent of the governed is more important than most anything else.

Pure Democracy is a bad thing. A little bit of aristocracy can go a long ways. We need the old Senate back where cranky old white guys (or cranky people of all demographics) appointed by their states sat around thinking about and protecting the structure of the system, not getting re-elected. The Senate should not be set up to be a place for political pandering

Representative democracy, where (in the States) you elect somebody to go make decisions for you, should involve somebody who physically lives near you, who only works part time making decisions, who is not representing too many people (100K seems about right), and who doesn't have a job for life.

Small, distributed, self-optimizing systems always win over centralized control. Always.

The system should be designed for corrupt politicians. Everybody should be assumed to be crooked and out for themselves and to hold and grow power

You can't form a governmental system based on altruism. It has to be based on people acting in their own interests

Politicians should not be able to make decisions today that require my kids to pay money for them 30 years from now. If my kids aren't represented, they shouldn't be able to be taxed

The president's term should be extended and he should be allowed only one term. That way he won't spend all of his time running for re-election.

Decisions today often look stupid tomorrow, but nothing can be done about them. All laws should have an expiration date. That way each generation can be directly asked which things it wants to continue and which things it wants to change or discontinue.

Citizens must feel part of a larger whole. Some kind of mandatory national service should be established where every young person must serve two years after leaving high school. This is good for the young people, for the country, and for the future of the system

[ADD] There is one more principle that deserves mentioning. There are three things it takes to be a absolute monarch: the ability to make laws, the ability to interpret laws, and the power to execute laws. In the U.S., these powers are deliberately put into separate hands. Some kind of wall -- or checks and balances -- is required with these three things. Solutions may vary.

Of course, you can (and probably should) add the rest of the Bill of Rights in there. This list was just to underscore those parts we seem to have lost.

I'm not saying that all governments should copy the U.S. Constitution. Far from it. I'm saying that there are underlying principles -- being wrong, having representative democracy, having an aristocracy, regularly changing power, and so on -- that support any kind of underlying system. These are not American ideas or any of that. These are things observed in the natural state of man. We look back on history and see when they worked and when countries failed because they were ignored. From a core set of principles you can architect millions of possible governmental systems. But without principles, it's like watching a monkey try to solve a math problem. There's no sense of context and direction.

Back in the 1700s, smart people looked around through two thousand years of history and tried to draw lessons and extract forth principles that would work under any circumstances. They thought they were building a new science.

It didn't work out as they had planned, mainly because once political parties were formed each party took this new "science" into directions of it's own, making it say whatever pleased them.

Nowadays most people don't know history, couldn't name a dozen governments that rose and fell and the possible reasons why. They are unable to describe in detail how their own governmental system works, even though they know it doesn't. At the same time technology is making possible things like controlling robots with your mind, fathering children years after you die, instantly and constantly collaborating with people all over the globe, and changing what it means to be human (or even what it means to be sentient).

The test is here. Are we ready for it?

Where the Net is Broken

2012-03-20T10:28:08Z

Couple of examples from the past month on how the internet is not working like it should.

More groupthink instead diversity. Over the past year or so, I've been taking my funny picture collection, which has been threatening to take over my hard drive, and moving it to the net. Nothing special or fancy, just a bunch of pictures tagged up so that I (or others) can find them. So if you're looking for a funny picture of a turtle or a poster you might could put up in your cube, you can find it easily. This is turning out to be a lot of work, so I decided once a week to do 16 and post them on my feeds. That way my friends can get a good laugh -- and I can make sure I've spread the word as much as possible. It also makes me accountable to others so I can be motivated to get them all moved over.

I ran into this graph of site traffic, which took me a bit to figure out.

As you can see, I keep adding stuff and people keep slowly coming by and using it. But why would traffic level off? After all, I'm continuing to add more material. And it's the same kind of material. The problem, best I can figure, is that I have several thousand followers on Google+. Even though each week I clearly post something along the lines of "Hey guys, this is my thing. Each week I post funny pictures on Friday. Please ignore if you don't like" Some folks don't get the memo. When they see a picture of a cute baby that they don't like because it's trivial or just noisy, they click the spam button. So Google marks spam as coming both from my account and my blog site.

This effectively means if you have a lot of followers you can't continually post things from your site that some of them might find worthless and/or annoying. Google is "helping" you conform to groupthink, i.e., basically rewarding (or not punishing) you only if you think and say the right things. Yay Google.

Empty wastelands of groups. I'm a member of an Agile group on LinkedIn. It has hundreds of members, but oddly nobody posts there. I really don't know why. One guy last week asked a question about Agile architecture. I asked a clarifying question, hoping to draw in others, but there were no takers. There are several other LinkedIn groups I am a member of which are like this. Why have a group where nobody posts? I felt sorry for the guy. You'd think a large group on X would be the place to ask questions and start discussions around X, right?

Along those lines, I'm a member of the HackerNews Facebook group. It also has no posts -- maybe one every couple of days. And it has thousands of members. So a few weeks ago I took to posting my blog entries over there. Who knows? Maybe it'll start up some conversation. And it did -- I got one guy posting that he hated people putting their blogs in the group and another guy telling me that I should strive for posting higher quality material to the list. The second guy said he almost clicked the "spam" button, but decided to comment instead. Thank you!

To me, the purpose of the "like" button is to take a large stream of things and help sort it out based on your preferences. What I was hearing (and what I a suspect is going on over at LinkedIn) is folks only wanting to post the very best material in a group. There's a lot of self-editing. So nobody posts anything. But the system only works with lots of data. You shouldn't be trying to write an encyclopedia. Every post shouldn't be a special snowflake. Instead you should be letting it all hang out and letting the system do it's job. So instead of active boards centered around user interests, we get these thousand-person groups where 2 people may post each month, and that's considered too much.

I fully understand and support the idea of having group standards -- you probably don't want my funny pictures of cats in your Agile group. However if the standards (self-imposed or not) are such that two thousand people can be there and only one person posts each week, something is broken. At such a low volume, I don't even see or notice any of that small volume when it finally does appear. There's too much other stuff going on in my feeds. And if it's going to be like that, what's the point of even having the group?

Not trying to rant. Forum designers set out to do one thing, but then they try to avoid one kind of failure so much that they end up falling into other traps. Good to point these out. Can't fix what you don't see is broken.

Using Bootstrap to Refurbish Old Websites - Lessons Learned

2012-03-12T13:11:13Z

A couple of years ago my wife and I put together what's known as "micro-sites" -- little clusters of web pages centered around a central topic. By choosing our writing style and customizing the content, we felt that we could offer a more useful and accessible place for people interested in a certain topic than, say, Wikipedia (which we both love.)

But I've always been unhappy with the HTML and layout on these projects. As we got into the work, we realized that hand-rolling and creating a small web of pages could be a lot of brutal, boring work -- much more difficult than blogging about the same thing over five years or so.

Here's what one of our sites, paycheck-stub.com, looked like.

Uggggh. A painful kind of ugly. Text not aligned well, divs overlapping each other, a big block of ugly color half-way down on the left.

After spending a couple of days playing around in my favorite IDE -- I always do a few by hand and then do the rest all at once -- I had updated everything to using Bootstrap. Take a look at the results.

Much better. Color-coordinated with more white space. Still room for improvement, though.

Looks better, plus it looks pretty good on a phone or tablet! Overall I'm very impressed. But here's some notes for others of you who might be doing the same thing.

Not every file was in one place. A nit, sure, but I had to find another Bootstrap page, take a look at it, download the zip file, then add in the other things I wanted to use. Perhaps if they joined the plugins download with the others it might be cleaner.

Button mix-in classes still not understood. Probably if I spent more than five minutes with the zip file I'd understand all the btn classes, but I didn't. So I thrashed around a bit, once more finding stuff I liked and copying it.

Not much of a gallery of page themes. Instead of a gallery, I just googled around for "bootstrap" until I found sites that looked like what I wanted. Worked just as well.

Could be too generic. I've read that some folks hate Bootstrap because it makes everything so damned generic. I'm holding out judgment on this -- it certainly improved my site quite a bit, but I can see where it might become an annoyance.

Lack of choosing color themes. I love the default color choices, but some kind of way to choose between multiple color themes could allow what looks like a lot more variation with a minimal impact on code. (Probably easy to do by hand. Don't know.) [Ed: Kudos to alert reader James Simmons who pointed out he has a great site for finding Bootstrap themes, {Wrap} Bootstrap.com. Nice-looking site, James! Now I know where I'm going next time I'm looking for options. :)]

Would love to see some JQuery examples. I'm sure there's all kinds of cool things to do, and I could develop them as I needed them, but still, it'd be good for somebody to write up a set of examples using JQuery and Bootstrap.

Some unknown magic. I get 99% of the code, like the viewport and apple meta tags, but some stuff is beyond me, like this snippet:
Be cool if I knew what I was doing there.

Overall bootstrap is awesome and I plan on using it exclusively in the future. All of these notes are just very small nits. But without people providing feedback, even great stuff can't continue to improve. Also I purposely just gripped this and ripped it. I did absolutely zero research into Bootstrap. Heck, I didn't even look at the files! So hopefully that makes this review more "honest". Overall, I've never seen a better web framework. Keep up the good work, guys!