Actual farmers kinda hate the way wealthy professionals bring their piles of cash and drive up land prices. But I see the appeal.
Death of a Programmer, Life of a Farmer
181–190 of 351 posts
Re: Death of a Programmer, Life of a Farmer
#182Earlier quoted context omitted.
Apparently, it’s not permitted: > In North-American zoning, zones clearly specify which use is allowed on it. In general, zones allow only one or two uses. For example, a residential single-family detached home zone tolerates only single-family detached houses. Don't try to put a convenience store or a school in one, nor a duplex. http://urbankchoze.blogspot.co.uk/2014/04/japanese-zoning.ht... Previous discussion: ht…
This is purely a suburban problem and typical of the short sightedness of suburban development, which often corrupts the political process because a mandated retail lot is one less high-profit residential home they can't sell. Here in the city, there are shops everywhere. Mix use residential is fairly common with retail on the ground floor and condos/apartments up top. This has created a glut of storefronts with vary…
I'd way rather have walking access to smaller independent grocers and bodegas than a mediocre specialty food store like Trader Joes with a big parking lot.
Re: Death of a Programmer, Life of a Farmer
#183It's funny to see this stuff go full-circle. My parents left the city in the early 90's to move to a small WI farm in the middle of nowhere (15min to get to a town of 5000 people). I can see the appeal of a simpler life. But the funny thing is, as a kid, I hated it. My parents got tired of the suburbs, I longed for it. They longed for simplicity, I longed for convenience. I hated the idea of having to drive long dist…
I'm in a similar situation. Grew up in a very rural area, swore to never live in the country as soon as I could leave.
Now I find myself wanting to move back someday - find a few acres just outside of a city. I miss the quiet and the privacy.
Re: Death of a Programmer, Life of a Farmer
#184Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is purely a suburban problem and typical of the short sightedness of suburban development, which often corrupts the political process because a mandated retail lot is one less high-profit residential home they can't sell. Here in the city, there are shops everywhere. Mix use residential is fairly common with retail on the ground floor and condos/apartments up top. This has created a glut of storefronts with vary…
I'd way rather have walking access to smaller independent grocers and bodegas than a mediocre specialty food store like Trader Joes with a big parking lot.
Except we're swimming in those. We actually lack the the goofier franchise stores.
Re: Death of a Programmer, Life of a Farmer
#185Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have this feeling that kids tend to hate where they grow up due to all of the perceived failings and things they're missing out on. I grew up in a relaxed beach town in Florida, and hated it. My family all moved from NYC and fell in love in a heartbeat. Something about not being in the same place for too long applies here, too.
Grew up in Fort Lauderdale (city) and my family owned land over in Everglades City (country) where we would go and enjoy the outdoors. Swimming fishing and boating in the 10,000 islands. Overall I actually had a pretty good childhood. A few years ago I moved to the Bay Area and do like it here. However recently I've been looking to purchase some land just outside the Bay Area to build a small cabin and grow a garden,…
>I've been looking to purchase some land just outside the Bay Area to build a small cabin...
You can do this in the Bay Area itself, though in general the closer you want to be to a supermarket, bank, etc. the more you'll pay. If you're west of Palo Alto, Los Altos, Mountain View, Cupertino and cross the 280, you encounter rural areas very quickly. And if you head far enough into the hills, prices begin to fall rapidly relative to flatland prices.
Near Boulder Creek, for instance, you can get 2 acres for $52K that's three miles from a shopping area: https://www.redfin.com/CA/San-Lorenzo-Valley/0-HARMON-GULCH-...
That's 23 miles from Cupertino via route 17 and smaller roads. Of course it helps if you enjoy living in the middle of the woods!
I've posted about this concept on HN before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9437492
Re: Death of a Programmer, Life of a Farmer
#186I've been thinking about this a lot lately, and this post definitely gives me some motivation. I'm a programmer who loves to code and build stuff, learning new programming languages and frameworks, discussing about architecture, etc. I love shipping new features and making customers happy. BUT inside of me a desire has been growing to go back to the roots, to live a life closer to the nature. I feel the need to spend…
I'm actually working on something like this, although minus the hippie aspect. The biggest hurdle (at least here in California) is zoning. Every county in California restricts ag-zoned land to (at most) two dwelling units, where "dwelling unit" is typically defined by having a kitchen. There are some ways to work around this, especially if you're willing to go the "tinyhouses on wheels" route, but you get into grey z…
I don't think that it has to be hippie at all. There would be some shared areas, but people would live at their own homes. The company and the farm would be shared, but that's the idea.
Guess that the whole twist would be to not only depend on agriculture for providing income and food.
Also, I wouldn't make it about living isolated from society, without electricity, cars or mobile phones. It would be a much more relaxed, simple life, but every individual or family would put their own limits, respecting their comfort zones.
And yes, there would be life in community, maybe sharing some meals or having kids play together, but as I said at the beginning, families would have their own houses or appartments, so they could also here decide how far they want to go.
The cool thing would be having lots of like-minded people (= engineers) living and working close together, which could develop into some nice side projects and ideas.
Re: Death of a Programmer, Life of a Farmer
#187I've been thinking about this a lot lately, and this post definitely gives me some motivation. I'm a programmer who loves to code and build stuff, learning new programming languages and frameworks, discussing about architecture, etc. I love shipping new features and making customers happy. BUT inside of me a desire has been growing to go back to the roots, to live a life closer to the nature. I feel the need to spend…
I thought it might be cool to do something like that by buying up a bunch of foreclosed land in Detroit.
Re: Death of a Programmer, Life of a Farmer
#188Yesterday I posted a comment about being careful about how we try to bring people into programming and making sure that we encourage people to openly and honestly examine themselves for whether this is something they want to do, and not just thoughtlessly grease the slide into "programming" for everybody. [1] This is the sort of thing I meant. Dig back into the first post and it's clear that this person was very inte…
As I sit here watching this parent post go grey, it is remarkable to me the degree to which people are bothered by the idea that automatic encouragement may not be a good idea, even when posted to a story about how someone didn't like programming as a career and even as people are singing the praises of the person realizing they don't want to be a programmer and probably should never have been a professional programm…
Your point is smart and very well-taken. You don't want to push people in a direction they don't really want to go. They are liable regret it later.
A person, especially a young person, can become convinced that they are OK with a path they don't much care for, for a few years, maybe a decade. But eventually fate will come knocking, and they will walk away or get depressed. You don't want to be the cause of those lost years.
Re: Death of a Programmer, Life of a Farmer
#189Not to question this guy's remarkable decision or the article itself, just one expression I see quit often and makes me cringe each time, that is : the real world (referred here as a little haven of nature). Is the 19th century Industrial revolution just an illusion, the factories, the cars, the towns, the wars just a view of the spirit, and the little birds singing in the trees the real world ? Is the current (elect…
I think, comparatively, given all the human and computer driven computation to create simulations on a screen resulting in something 1/100,000,000th as complex as a sqft of rainforest... Yes its not real. Computation has been trapped inside boxes and tiny screens, virtualization with behaviors that don't even approach the richness and complexity of reality outside that box. Don't get me wrong, it's a noble and passio…
I'm sorry, but this makes no sense.
given all the human and computer driven computation to create simulations on a screen resulting in something 1/100,000,000th as complex as a sqft of rainforest
This is an absurd comparison. Besides being apples to oranges, besides being super arbitrary (where did you get 1 square foot?), besides being completely undefined (what kinds of simulations are you talking about?).. it doesn't make any sense.
Let's follow your logic a little bit. * A butterfly in the rainforest creates a chrysalis. That chrysalis is not real because it's 1/100,000,000th as complex as a square foot of rainforest. It's a noble and passionate endeavor, but it doesn't even approach the richness and complexity of reality outside that chrysalis.
Does that make sense to you? Do you agree with it?
Let's use your logic to try to compare apples to apples. Let's compare a square mile of rainforest to a square mile of New York City. Is one more real than the other? Since you seem to think complexity has something to do with realness (an idea that seems silly and arbitrary, but let's go with it), is one more complex than the other? Hard to say. The rainforest almost certainly has more individual living things. But is that how we define complexity? The city is chock full of human brains, and it's hard to argue with the fact that the human brain is one of the most complex things on the planet. The city also seems low in entropy compared to the jungle. The very fact that a city exists, distinct from the jungle, seems to imply lower entropy. If you let the city go without tending for a long time (and if its location was right), it would become jungle. You might argue that that's because there's no one keeping the complexity high. And since high complexity means more real (I still don't get it, but I'm just going with your "logic"), I have shown the city is more real than the jungle.
Does that make sense? Not really? It's definitely not rigorous. It's not based on sound principles. The logic is faulty in all kinds of ways. It makes leaps of logic and uses poorly defined concepts. Does that stand out more when I do it compared to when you're doing it? I urge you to not be "that guy" or "that girl" that uses that kind of logic.
Re: Death of a Programmer, Life of a Farmer
#190I grew up on a farm. Not surprised to see this decision in the slightest. Farming is tough -- physically, financially, and in the end emotionally. But it is still a very rewarding life. I can remember sitting on my grandfather's lap, riding on his John Deere two-cylinder (it was called a Johnny Popper.) Pre-school? I went to pre-farming. I was probably 3 years old the first time I rode a tractor. By the time I was 8,…
"The farm life works for some people" I agree. I couldn't do farm, I have bad allergies to pollen, dust, and too much time under the sun and I become red as a lobster, and it is painful But programming is what I love to do. So I will say "The programmer life works for some people" I wouldn't call the original article "The death of a programmer", I would call it "The born of a farmer". He figure out were he feels happ…
As a child, I interacted with the first computer, a TI-99/4A, on a farm. So, for me the best programming inspiration is mixing nature with computers.