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Do One Thing

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Re: Do One Thing

#121

Post by adjwilli »

ybx wrote: post #45
ZenoArrow wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In this context... "specialized" = Do one thing "flexible" = and do it well. That said, the key ingredient of the Unix philosophy that is missing isn't specialised, flexible tools, it's composability of those tools. Imagine if you couldn't pipe grep output to another program, wouldn't it be a lot less useful? I'd say so. There are ways we can get around this, but they would require a fair amount of development time.…

How does flexible mean do it well? "Do it well" is so vague of a saying that it really could mean any of those things, whether it be flexibility, or simplicity, or etc.

What I understand flexible to mean is "serving 99% of use case scenarios". Arguably Photoshop does this, Instagram does not. Or maybe a better analogy is Photoshop vs Photoshop Elements, which probably only servers 80% of use case scenarios. Or Chrome OS (80% of desktop use case scenarios) vs Windows (99.9%).

Re: Do One Thing

#122

Post by an_ko »

jobu wrote: post #27

There is some merit to "doing one thing well", but taken to the extreme it can be horrible in a different way: tar cvf - FILE-LIST | gzip -c > FILE.tar.gz ( https://xkcd.com/1168/ )

Just alias it.

Re: Do One Thing

#123

Post by justinhj »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #80
JoBrad wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because it's really convenient to be able to make a note on your phone or tablet, then access it and make additional post-meeting notes shortly thereafter, on a laptop, all in the same interface (so you have the same features, or at least a set of common features). That's just one, assuming you never want formatting, tables, pictures, etc.

Oh Emacs does tables[0] better than anything out there, except maybe MS Excel. Definitely eats stuff like Evernote or Google Drive for breakfast. [0] - http://orgmode.org/

I love org mode but due to the fact that emacs doesn't run on my phone and Evernote does, I take notes on Evernote when I'm not at my computer

Re: Do One Thing

#124

Post by josho »

hueving wrote: post #96
TeMPOraL wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends. I accept the capitalism's ability to raise resources (capital) for larger-scale projects, but generally profit motive fucks everything up. The Internet was fine until every pathetic "enterepreneur" out there smelled easy money and come to ruin it all. It happens in every industry. Capitalism creates abundance - but abundance of worst possible crap sellers can still get away with.

The Internet wasn't even accessible to the general public without capitalism motivating the creation of ISPs.

That may be true. But, the Internet existed because of massive multi-decade investment from folks without a profit motive. All of the fundamental Internet protocols were created through those organizations.

Look at what capitalism gave us as an Internet like experience: compuserve, aol, etc. Those were all horrible closed wall systems.

Re: Do One Thing

#125

Post by saosebastiao »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #84
saosebastiao wrote: post #20

I'm definitely guilty of holding onto a philosophy and thinking it applies universally, so I can't blame people that hold onto the Unix philosophy extremely strongly. But I can't help but think that the world requires a hell of a lot more pragmatism than the Unix philosophy can provide. The first problem I see is that "One Thing" is really subjective. Some people might see Postgres as doing one thing really well (It…

> Who would ever want just the text aspect of their notes synchronized across devices, but not their photos that they took of powerpoint slides, their data tables, their diagrams, their emails, etc.? That's one thing I don't get. Dropbox could have made a decent markdown or (please, pretty please) org-mode editor and would have blown everyone out the water. Editor over Dropbox is a perfect thing - unlike every other…

I've actually asked Dropbox to do exactly this, but no dice. Their mobile app allows you to edit text files fairly easily, but no web client.

It would be amazing if they would just let me use this on their website:

http://coolwanglu.github.io/vim.js/streamlinejs/vim.html

Re: Do One Thing

#126

Post by marssaxman »

roel_v wrote: post #115
TeMPOraL wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is little actual content in present day Internet relative to its size. Look, what is produced on those websites that also tend to carry heavy presentation is not content. Real content is Wikipedia, or Hacker News, or various people and their various topical subpages, personal blogs, up and including stuff hosted at Geocities and Tripod Lycos. What is not content is most of the stuff that's created for money, in…

I don't care about content/download size ratio, I care about content (quantity and quality) in absolute size. Download speeds have progressed faster than page bloat. Wikipedia didn't exist in 1999 (not for years, and even Slashdot was barely more than a gossip site. Good quality discussion back then was on usenet or irc. The concept of a 'mooc' was just a wet dream of some 'cypherpunks' and 'technoanarchists'. Downlo…

I didn't make any claims about the things you are talking about, only that it was more fun. Which it was. It's boring now. I used to go poke around, following random links just to see what was out there, encountering all kinds of oddball pages which represented nothing more than some person's individual gift to the world, and it was fascinating. It was fun to watch it all grow. I felt motivated to contribute, to share my own pages full of whatever information or opinions I happened to have. Photos of interesting places, stories about cities I'd visited, didn't matter; it all seemed like it was worth sharing, because that's what the web basically was.

I don't find that anymore. Homepages came and went, blogs came and went, and if there's still a thriving web out there beyond the big commercial sites, I don't know where to look to find it.

I still have my personal site, and I still post on my blog occasionally, but it increasingly feels like calling into the wind. I'm not going to just switch over and post all the same stuff on some big commercial site; fuck that. The web was awesome when it looked like it was going to be a new way for humanity to talk to itself; now it seems like little more than another way for rich people to make money. It does that very impressively, but who cares? Rich people always had ways to make money and will always find more; it's not very exciting when they turn yet another collaborative community project into a profit center.

Re: Do One Thing

#127

Post by dreeves »

icebraining wrote: post #120
hawkice wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are quite a few things in the fourth category, and I'd like to say, for instance: Beeminder. Specialized, but there is a lot going on. Honestly, I like it. I could just keep a text file if I didn't want those features, and I honestly can't think of any features I would subtract. Which raises the larger question: are the advocating flexible but simple tools, straightforward but domain specific tools, or are they…

I could just keep a text file if I didn't want those features, and I honestly can't think of any features I would subtract. But the point about simple & flexible tools is not to miss on features for the user, but to separate those into different tools. The people who prefer a simple text editor to an IDE aren't doing everything else by hand, but using a set of different tools to accomplish the same as the IDE built-i…

I'm tempted to quibble that you can use Beeminder without a credit as long as you never go off track. But ultimately I think you're right, we're guilty of this. Ideally the Quantified Self part and the commitment contract part would be independent but interoperable tools.

Re: Do One Thing

#128

Post by hueving »

josho wrote: post #124
hueving wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Internet wasn't even accessible to the general public without capitalism motivating the creation of ISPs.

That may be true. But, the Internet existed because of massive multi-decade investment from folks without a profit motive. All of the fundamental Internet protocols were created through those organizations. Look at what capitalism gave us as an Internet like experience: compuserve, aol, etc. Those were all horrible closed wall systems.

But there are many massive investments at the academic and government research level that lead to nothing directly useful for consumers due to lack of investment interests in bringing it to market. Just look at the next generation Internet architectures that go nowhere. You can't ignore economics.

Re: Do One Thing

#129

Post by bigethan »

ahallock wrote: post #88
bigethan wrote: post #5

I had two thoughts while reading this. 1 - The need for the web to be profitable in some way makes 'single tools' hard to build. You have to grow users, add features, etc, etc. So even if you have an API or something useful it likely won't scale economically. Unless it's government supported or behind a foundation of some sort. The Twitter API comes to mind here. 2 - This is tricky because for the web to meet the UNI…

Capitalism ruins everything fun? Not sure I follow. There are so many amazing APIs available now, which aren't as frictionless as using Unix tools -- but why would they be? Unix tools are installed locally and don't fall under the same constraints as communicating with an external system. It's apples and oranges. I was just using an API the other day to validate addresses. It's an amazing thing, being able to hit an…

Sure it's pretty good. But can it interop with other APIs predictably forever without paying Zapier?

And the capitalism dig has to do with when your address verification endpoint decides that an API isn't profitable. Or that it's better for them to change the format of the response. Or require you to have a account of some sort. Or rate limit. Or...

In the overall picture, if you're not helping someone earn money, you're living on borrowed time with the services they provide.

Re: Do One Thing

#130

Post by ahallock »

bigethan wrote: post #129
ahallock wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Capitalism ruins everything fun? Not sure I follow. There are so many amazing APIs available now, which aren't as frictionless as using Unix tools -- but why would they be? Unix tools are installed locally and don't fall under the same constraints as communicating with an external system. It's apples and oranges. I was just using an API the other day to validate addresses. It's an amazing thing, being able to hit an…

Sure it's pretty good. But can it interop with other APIs predictably forever without paying Zapier? And the capitalism dig has to do with when your address verification endpoint decides that an API isn't profitable. Or that it's better for them to change the format of the response. Or require you to have a account of some sort. Or rate limit. Or... In the overall picture, if you're not helping someone earn money, yo…

So what magical system did you have in mind that would suffer none of your potential problems? Even a publicly funded service is still as vulnerable. Services you run yourself still cost money and have their unique set of problems. The cost benefit to using APIs is that you're outsourcing that complexity to someone else in exchange for money so you can concentrate on your core business. It's why AWS is so popular. Yes, they could shut down, but the risk is worth it. Doing it all in house is the other risk... maybe your programmers can't develop the solution needed and your company tanks because you wasted a bunch of time and money building your own address verification service for fear the external API might shut down.

The USPS (which is quasi-private, I'll admit) offers address verification, but their service hasn't been reliable, which is why we have competitors now. Your fallacy is that because something isn't flawless that the whole system is a failure. And throwing around the word 'profit' as some pejorative, dirty word is an emotional manipulation. How else would people hire or expand if not for profit? The service I'm using (Smartystreets) now offers international address verification; I'm not sure how they would have paid for that if it weren't for profit. That extra money you bring home from your job after taxes and other expenses... that's profit. Your employer is living on borrowed time from the services you provide. What happens when you quit, change your rate, or become bored with your job? I guess it's worth the risk to them.

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