11–20 of 40 posts
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structure_and_Interpretation_of...
SICP is an extraordinarily difficult book; "Simply Scheme" by Brian Harvey and Matt Wright is a good stepping-stone.
1. Don't ever use the phrase "as a community" unless you carefully define it first. 2. What, specifically, about a flea market is bad. If the complaint is about quality, I'll refer you to Sturgeon's law. 3. You're going to need to explain the competitive vs cooperative comment, right now I have no idea what you are saying. 4. Your comment about "blogging, teaching and tweeting" is true, but I think it is clearly an i…
I agree with you. In the real world, communication skills are important. Far more issues are caused by poor developer communication than by poor coding skills. Blogging, teaching and tweeting help you build those skills. Coding is only one part of development, and it's by far the easiest part to master.
Yes, at about 5% of the speed you could learn by actually working on your communication skills with your colleagues on a day to day basis.
1. Don't ever use the phrase "as a community" unless you carefully define it first. 2. What, specifically, about a flea market is bad. If the complaint is about quality, I'll refer you to Sturgeon's law. 3. You're going to need to explain the competitive vs cooperative comment, right now I have no idea what you are saying. 4. Your comment about "blogging, teaching and tweeting" is true, but I think it is clearly an i…
"4. Your comment about "blogging, teaching and tweeting" is true, but I think it is clearly an improvement compared to the previous system. Portfolio based systems are almost always better than credential based systems." Are they really though? On what basis? 99% of my best work can't form part of my portfolio. I spend 2 hours of my own time on L&D each week day. Maybe 30 minutes of it is on projects I could present.…
There are certainly problems with the portfolio model, but I've never heard anyone seriously argue that it's worse than credentials.
> Because being highly skilled at both writing and software development is rare, those who can do it well are often get the most attention and influence from the software world, turning these folks into “thought leaders” that drive the overall direction of the community. Improving writing education can increase the pool of software developers who write/teach well. Teaching is often an excellent way to learn, because…
Related to your last point:
> How about finding ways to compensate those who already produce valuable content in the commons, so they can have more time to do what they already do well?
This is actually what I've been trying to do with my own reader-funded project (http://practicingruby.com). I've been modestly funded for five years now to produce free documentation for Ruby programmers (and really anyone who is interested in software development that can read Ruby).
Occasionally, we've paid contributors to help us publish articles. Right now I'm trying to do a Kickstarter to give us some seed funding to really expand the number of contributors we can work with, and my existing subscription revenue will fund me so that I can assist these folks with editing, research, code cleanup, etc. That helps expand the pool of potential contributors, because folks don't need to be expert programmers or writers, they just need to be working on something interesting and willing to try to share their knowledge and experience with others.
Those who want to support the contributors fund are welcome to do so here: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/828998531/practicing-ru... -- 100% of this money will go to the authors of the articles, I'm not keeping any for myself.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is a way to fix the problem that you are observing: 1. Create a "subweb". It is composed of the following 1A. A new specification for the publishing of information in complete form ( read structured content published together with templates to present them ) 1B. Both server and client systems that implement the new specification over some sort of modified http but without using current DNS 1C. A free distribute…
1A: Wikipedia, github (e.g. awesome-*) 1B: named-data networking, camlistore, ipfs.io, bittorrent's web -- very easy to censor since all content is uniquely identified by a hash 1C: ? 1D: Usenet, Wikipedia, Wikidata 1E: technically difficult, see history of YaCY and http://juretriglav.si/an-open-distributed-search-engine-for-... 2: Wikipedia, but content is rejected under arcane citation policy 3: Wikipedia, but cont…
The system has to be brainless to use if it is going to succeed at all, and it has to have enough initial buy in to be worth bothering with initially.
Wikipedia as you have pointed out has arcane crazy policies that restrict it from having user generated content. It claims to only be a replication of printed articles. That is lies, but it is a pain in the butt to actually get valuable content into it and not have it removed.
Usenet suffers from not having structured data, being just chunks of text.
Github suffers from refusing to host binaries except for in weird cases ( there is a binary build hosting I think?? )
Bittorrent suffers from still being attached to hostnames for the most part ( I'm aware of the distributed system it has too but you typically can't get many seeds through it )
Most systems that allow content suffer from having copyrighted data on them. The goal of this would be for it to be publicly known that there is no copyrighted data, such that universities and such would be willing to run the distributed server, and censorship could be stopped by enough people running it globally.
I'm not focusing on funding of libraries so much as the fact that they have an established set of categories to put information into. There is no such standardized list of categories for websites to go into, and the creation of such is important to the future of the internet.
1. Don't ever use the phrase "as a community" unless you carefully define it first. 2. What, specifically, about a flea market is bad. If the complaint is about quality, I'll refer you to Sturgeon's law. 3. You're going to need to explain the competitive vs cooperative comment, right now I have no idea what you are saying. 4. Your comment about "blogging, teaching and tweeting" is true, but I think it is clearly an i…
Thanks for the feedback! > 1. Community is absolutely a weasel word when you're using it to lump together people from many different backgrounds and speak on behalf of them, or to act as if your particular sense of identity is representative of a whole group. Help me find a better word for what I'm trying to say here: When I say "as a community" I mean, "as people who ought to be concerned about the social impact of…
"Profession" is the word you want here, I think.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
1A: Wikipedia, github (e.g. awesome-*) 1B: named-data networking, camlistore, ipfs.io, bittorrent's web -- very easy to censor since all content is uniquely identified by a hash 1C: ? 1D: Usenet, Wikipedia, Wikidata 1E: technically difficult, see history of YaCY and http://juretriglav.si/an-open-distributed-search-engine-for-... 2: Wikipedia, but content is rejected under arcane citation policy 3: Wikipedia, but cont…
I agree completely that many aspects are covered by existing technology. The difficulty is in making it such that all of this can exist as a simple set of open source binaries regular people can run ( not computer experts ) The system has to be brainless to use if it is going to succeed at all, and it has to have enough initial buy in to be worth bothering with initially. Wikipedia as you have pointed out has arcane…
On the topic of categories: once upon a time, dmoz was an open competitor to Yahoo, when hierarchical categories were used for discovery. It's now the Open Directory Project: http://rdf.dmoz.org/ . Google acquired the best-in-class open data graph FreeBase and later killed it. The data has since moved to Wikidata, which is the closest we have to an open version of the proprietary semantic graphs which have been constructed by Google, Facebook, Bing, Diffbot, etc. Some related ideas at http://openknowledgegraph.org/
Agreed that end-user deployment and usability need to be brainless and the system must be initially seeded with high-quality content. Usability is expensive and often specific to vertical market segments, hence would be best implemented by competing commercial applications which operate on the public, open, distributed data. But there would be the risk of commercial centralization (like Github/Gmail) of the open protocol.
It will be a challenge to orchestrate the boundaries between commercial software and open content, but this dynamic is arguably responsible for the construction of the entire Internet. We need to find balanced and stable boundaries between commerce & commons, because neither is going away.
> Because being highly skilled at both writing and software development is rare, those who can do it well are often get the most attention and influence from the software world, turning these folks into “thought leaders” that drive the overall direction of the community. Improving writing education can increase the pool of software developers who write/teach well. Teaching is often an excellent way to learn, because…
Very thoughtful feedback, thanks! Related to your last point: > How about finding ways to compensate those who already produce valuable content in the commons, so they can have more time to do what they already do well? This is actually what I've been trying to do with my own reader-funded project ( http://practicingruby.com ). I've been modestly funded for five years now to produce free documentation for Ruby progra…
What do you think of the economic boundary between timeless content (foundational principles) and time-sensitive/perishable content? LWN segments their free/paid offerings by time. One could argue that there's another, missing category: review/summary articles which contextualize the perishable content and extract implications for long-lived assumptions.
On one hand, there are ecosystem-wide benefits from removing financial barriers to entry, e.g. free and high-quality content on foundational principles, proven over time by competition between many alternatives. On the other hand, there is economic value to be created from high-quality synthesis, for audiences which can afford and apply this synthesis to immediate commercial problems.
How can we segment these two audiences? Softcover.io seems to have been successful, with the Rails tutorial as one data point with substantial revenue (6 figures) even though the core content was free to read.
For those who want a good free programmer education and are willing to put in some work to get it: look at source code, not blogs, and work on projects with experienced programmers, don't just read what they write. There's a natural alignment of incentives when you're working on the same codebase as someone who actually knows what they're doing. Any mistake you make, they have to fix, and so they have good reasons to…
A smart high-school student who enjoys a challenge comes up to you and asks which projects to look at, and (if you say more than one) which one to start with. What do you say?
> Because being highly skilled at both writing and software development is rare, those who can do it well are often get the most attention and influence from the software world, turning these folks into “thought leaders” that drive the overall direction of the community. Improving writing education can increase the pool of software developers who write/teach well. Teaching is often an excellent way to learn, because…
Very thoughtful feedback, thanks! Related to your last point: > How about finding ways to compensate those who already produce valuable content in the commons, so they can have more time to do what they already do well? This is actually what I've been trying to do with my own reader-funded project ( http://practicingruby.com ). I've been modestly funded for five years now to produce free documentation for Ruby progra…
The tech community has seen to it that this doesn't happen with: file sharing of copyrighted material and adblock.
You can't first destroy entire industries in the name of 'freedom of speech' and then cry about how you can't make money in those industries any longer.
Content is now cheap and it's only getting worse. Which means content providers will be forced to take on jobs that they don't actually want to do (or are necessarily good at) to survive.