This is going to stay popular for a while...

"I have a high IQ" click

Data from any one weather station can neither prove nor disprove – well – I would guess pretty much anything climate related.

The author doesn’t claim any such thing and the article is actually a quite nice read. The headline here stretches the hyperbole of the original headline quite a bit too much, though.

ESR often comes across as unbearably pompous and self-important, but here he strikes a very constructive posture of hard-earned humility and even tough love.

No offence, but am I supposed to expect a blog post on the Company blog about working with the founder to be unbiased?

Given that and the reverential tone, I am inclined to discount it.

Bonus exercise: Replace "Zuck" with "Chuck Norris" in the entire post and note how it doesn't seem any less ridiculous :)

My original article was 6 pages long, this is an abridged version. So I was not able to convey all the concepts I would have liked to as clearly as possible. That said, let me throw myself into the fray.

It's not about "being lazy". I know people who come in by 7:30 and leave by 9pm. They are not lazy. They work really hard. But they will never be CEO of the company.

It's about challenging yourself. Becoming better. Training. When you can do stuff good, then you have to find stuff you can't do as well that is even harder.

If I am a Django programmer, after 6 months the challenge in Django is minimal. I can work 10 hours a day on Django and it's not really a challenge anymore.

So it's not about laziness really. It's about not being complacent in your current abilities.

From Hamming's "You and Your Research":

  You observe that most great scientists have tremendous
  drive. I worked for ten years with John Tukey at Bell
  Labs. He had tremendous drive. One day about three or
  four years after I joined, I discovered that John Tukey
  was slightly younger than I was. John was a genius and
  I clearly was not. Well I went storming into Bode's
  office and said, ``How can anybody my age know as much
  as John Tukey does?'' He leaned back in his chair, put
  his hands behind his head, grinned slightly, and said,
  "You would be surprised Hamming, how much you would know
  if you worked as hard as he did that many years."

  I simply slunk out of the office!

  What Bode was saying was this: "Knowledge and productivity
  are like compound interest." Given two people of approximately
  the same ability and one person who works ten percent
  more than the other, the latter will more than twice
  outproduce the former. The more you know, the more you
  learn; the more you learn, the more you can do; the more
  you can do, the more the opportunity - it is very much
  like compound interest. I don't want to give you a rate,
  but it is a very high rate. Given two people with exactly
  the same ability, the one person who manages day in and
  day out to get in one more hour of thinking will be
  tremendously more productive over a lifetime. I took
  Bode's remark to heart; I spent a good deal more of my
  time for some years trying to work a bit harder and I
  found, in fact, I could get more work done. I don't like
  to say it in front of my wife, but I did sort of neglect
  her sometimes; I needed to study. You have to neglect
  things if you intend to get what you want done. There's
  no question about this.

The entire essay is well worth reading and makes many excellent points. It's been mentioned many times here on HN, and is one of the essays on PG's site:

http://www.paulgraham.com/hamming.html

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=229067

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=852405

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=915515

http://searchyc.com/you+and+your+research+hamming?sort=by_da...

Unsurprisingly, it's all over the 'net:

http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=%22You+and+your+research%22...

My biggest gripe with modern programming is the sheer volume of arbitrary stuff I need to know. My current project has so far required me to know about Python, Django, Google App Engine and it's datastore, XHTML, CSS, JQuery, Javascript, JSON, and a clutch of XML schema, APIs and the like.

Don't get me wrong, I'm grateful for all of it, but it just doesn't seem like what I was promised when I followed SICP for the first time. It just feels like I spend most of my time scouring through documentation and trying to remember umpteen different sets of syntax and class names rather than actually thinking in code.

Back in ye olden days, most programming tasks I performed felt quite natural and painless, just a quiet little chat between me and the compiler. Sometimes longwinded, sometimes repetitive, but I just sat and though and typed and software happened. The work I do these days feels more like being a dogsbody at the tower of babel. I just don't seem to feel fluent in anything much any more.

We talk about 'flow' quite a lot in software and I just have to wonder what's happening to us all in that respect. Just like a conversation becomes stilted if the speakers keep having to refer to their phrasebooks and dictionaries, I wonder how much longer it will be possible to retain any sort of flowful state when writing software. Might the idea of mastery disappear forever under a constant torrent of new tools and technologies?

I still think that the Steam platform is the golden standard for DRM. The Assassin's Creed 2 DRM still comes from the old-school plan of restricting the legitimate needs of cash-paying customers, which makes the cracked version superior to the original. Steam, on the other hand, gives me more features rather than less: I can install the game on multiple machines, or the same machine multiple times, even if I lose the hard copy. It saves me a trip to the store, which was half the reason I pirated games back in college. I can pre-load the game and play it literally the second it comes out without having to camp outside a Fry's two hours away. They're by no means essential features and I rarely use any of them, but that whole thing about making sure your copy is legitimate is a hell of a lot easier to swallow when it's sold as the price of a new feature.

(obligatory: http://xkcd.com/488/ )