kenamarit

Agreed! I grew up outside Fort Worth, and a lot of the jokes, characters, and scenes in King of the Hill (like Silicon Valley) hit painfully close to home

KitSplit | https://kitsplit.com | New York City, NY / Brooklyn | Full time, ONSITE or REMOTE okay

Hi there I'm Ken, co-founder and CTO of KitSplit. We are looking for a full stack engineer to join our team! KitSplit is a rental marketplace for cameras and related gear like lights, lenses, and VR gear.

We're a small team, and you would be our 2nd full-time engineer. We have a good group of people working with us right now, and we are very much a part of the creative community that we serve. The bulk of our application is built in Ruby/Rails and you would have major input into how our product develops. You would be in on the ground floor of a quickly growing company. We're currently based in the Hearst Tower in Manhattan.

More details here: https://angel.co/kitsplit/jobs/156298-developer

You can contact me at ken@kitsplit.com.

If anyone else is interested, here's a link to someone's repost of "Why I'm a Bad Correspondent"

http://www.carlkingdom.com/neal-stephenson-why-i-am-a-bad-co...

As a video game developer in NYC (I also participated in Art Hack Day: God Mode that you mentioned above, I dug your project!), I agree with you that "art" is being conflated with "high-net-worth individuals being told what art to buy from dealers."

I also agree with everyone that there are many technologists very interested in art, and maybe even a good percentage who understand this specific art world that the article talks about and how it works. The problem, however, is that the ones who are most likely to understand and perhaps even appreciate this art world are also the least likely to have any money--they are more akin to fellow "starving artists" running around Bushwick.

Though most programmers I know say they aren't in it for the money, and mostly I think this is true, in the Art-Tech intersection specifically there are many who can hack who don't actually make that much money from it.

Hey thanks! I will definitely redo the website now that I have some time! I'll get to work on a hi-res trailer too.

More info + trailer here!

www.voyagerthegame.com

Yes! I used to live in Bernal Heights in San Francisco and commute to SOMA everyday, and this is how my commute options broke down, time and money-wise:

Bike to BART, BART to Powell - 30 min, $1.75

Bike straight to work - 30 min, free

Bus to BART, BART to Powell - 30 minutes, $3.50 (I think?)

Bus to work - 45-60 minutes, $1.75

Bum a ride to work - 30-45 minutes, free

AND biking adds many non-quantifiable benefits, as the OP states. It's the best way to clear your mind, other than maybe a long walk or hike.

[edit for formatting]

"They expect to be listened to when they have an idea, even when they’re the youngest person in the room."

Speaking as a gen-y-er, I completely agree with this sentiment. From my experience working in offices, there are always two conflicting thoughts I consider when speaking up, however:

1. The established politics of the office and who you are "allowed" to speak to and what you're allowed to say, and

2. The reality of the actual task/goal you are trying to accomplish.

Even if your ideas are good and beneficial to the work at hand, sometimes #1 is more important than #2. If this is true then I will quit as soon as I am able.

It's generally true that I consider my elders peers, not authority figures, as the article states. This does not mean I don't have a lot to learn from them! In fact, I want to learn, teach me, guide me!

However, like anyone and everyone you run into in life, an elder in the workplace has to earn my trust and respect, they need to prove to me that they are worth learning from. Just because you are older than me does not mean your ideas are worth listening to. Sometimes having a higher rank does correlate to being someone worth listening to. Just as often I have found this to be not true.

For me: I played a little bit of jazz band in college, and every single semester 30% of the band was made up of engineer students (my comp sci friends were comp sci students/jazz band members).

Miles was one of my first loves in high school. RE this article, he praises some of my favorites, and slams some of my favorites, so the upvote is because I never knew his take on these songs and players, so it's very enlightening!

Definitely, great idea. I'll add some sort of email sign up widget to the website, thanks!

Thanks, and the woolbuddy.com dude is amazing! Saw him and his giant needlefelted creatures at the Maker Faire a couple years ago.

I actually use a Galaxy Nexus myself, but I decided to switch from Corona SDK (cross platform) to objective-C and cocos2d! I guess ideally I intend for it to be played on the iPad, but I definitely want to port to Android when I'm done!

Same here! I'm about 6 months in and working alone, but inexperienced on the biz end. It turns out that my simple project is way more work than I realized up front. Definitely more than the last ruby on rails web app I built, and that was moderately complex. Luckily with experience in code, art, animation, and music, I can avoid major costs up front.

But the black art of game design is a little new to me (other than from playing and observing other games), and really it is the trickiest part, it's the glue that binds everything together. This could end up a lifelong obsession, and one could easily spend a lifetime tinkering to master it.

I have a similar tactic for combatting the crazy amount of work: more vegetables and long walks. I think it works...

First, I have to agree, tipping is a bizarre system/cultural norm, and I am very curious about how, historically, this came to be...

From my perspective, I spent a year working as a barista and bartender part-time when I first moved to New York, and I would estimate that 80% of those who work as a waiter, barista or bartender do it to support themselves as they pursue whatever it is they do (the usual suspects: acting, art, music, writing, school etc.). This is what kids do to get by--they're not committed in any way to the place they work.

At my coffee shop (not at restaurants or bars) I got paid minimum wage plus tips, which at the time was something like $8 + on average $4 to $8 an hour. I can't say I agreed or disagreed with the system at the time, or that I even thought about it, but from my experience the lure of tips greatly outweighed any set amount of (low) salary I would have received. For example, I've gotten a couple $100 tips from Wall St. ballers, or one time $40 from a man just for pouring a cup of coffee! If you work at any number of restaurants, the odds are much higher that on any given night, you will win the tip lottery. And the more a man drinks, the more he will open his heart (and wallet) to the young, struggling artist behind the bar.

For the waiter/bartender/barista, I would guess that the average wage comes out to about the same as a respectable working wage for the skills involved (maybe $15-$20/hr). If you work at a Michelin rated restaurant, you would have to get a much much higher starting salary to compensate for a lack of tips, at least in NYC.

I liked the play-by-play refutation of the comic, he really researched the whole thing (so I didn't have to). I learned some new things!

I enjoyed the tone of the comic, however, even if it was inaccurate or disputable or at times just plain wrong. For me, Edison is one of those figures, like Christopher Columbus, or George Washington, that you learn about every single year growing up, since kindergarten, and whose myth is so grand and ubiquitous that every teacher I had from elementary school up until junior year physics said the exact same thing about him. Tesla was just another of a dozen names in the textbook.

So in a way I understand the sentiment. You grow up being told that this is guy, Edison, is the most awesome inventor in the history of America. And because of that I always felt a certain distrust about his accomplishments (even if I'm wrong), because so much of what my teachers taught me growing up turned out to be wrong.

Here's a parallel situation at the high school level.

At Stuyvesant High School here in NYC admissions is 100% test base, meaning the only criteria for acceptance is your test score. Here's a quote about their acceptance policy (from an article called "Paper Tigers" in NY Mag last year):

"Entrance to Stuyvesant, one of the most competitive public high schools in the country, is determined solely by performance on a test: The top 3.7 percent of all New York City students who take the Specialized High Schools Admissions Test hoping to go to Stuyvesant are accepted. There are no set-asides for the underprivileged or, conversely, for alumni or other privileged groups. There is no formula to encourage “diversity” or any nebulous concept of “well-­roundedness” or “character.” Here we have something like pure meritocracy. This is what it looks like: Asian-­Americans, who make up 12.6 percent of New York City, make up 72 percent of the high school."

Not sure if this article ever made Hacker News, but it's worth reading if you have a chance. It's long-winded, but being Asian-American myself there's a sort of poetic-truth to it:

http://nymag.com/news/features/asian-americans-2011-5/

There must be. I just got back from a trip to Paris and I went with a friend to visit the catacombs (a Parisian who had never been), and she told me that in high school (or lycee or whatever they call it in France) that her and her brother would go to underground parties where they'd have to enter through sewers. Seems like knowledge of getting underground is widespread if you know who to ask and where to look.

Thanks for the link!

I think I understand what you're saying...The site (say of a bunch of indie web series, for example) acts as a production company that deals with all the logistics of getting the work distributed to venues where one would actually watch them?

I think there might be something there (if I understand it correctly), but I also think that it would almost be moving backwards because one of the goals should be to completely cut out digital distribution platforms as we know it. Not that I have any personal or strong emotional issue with them.

But with smartphones and iPads and God only knows what other engaging new technologies that will come out, the distribution infrastructure doesn't need to rely on top box manufacturers, or cable, or movie theatres. And similarly the content doesn't need to be made in the traditional way or even resemble traditional forms.

I love going to the movies, but more and more it's becoming the exception instead of the norm. I'm a little old fashioned in that I think you can't replace the experience of seeing a movie in the theatre. There's something there that makes it absolutely worth it. Similarly, you can't replace the experience of seeing live opera at the Met, if that's your thing.

For me, the hope is that kids growing up today will think that cable TV is dumb and going to a theatre to see a movie is old fashioned, something reserved for their parents' generation.

I myself am one of the statistics mentioned in the article. I studied comp sci for two years then switched to a BFA. Still, it's so much easier to find work as a programmer so that's what I do.

Yes, engineering is hard. It is much easier to slack through a liberal arts degree, yes. However, for me I felt that my education in computer science was too narrow. To study it I had to drop jazz band, I had to drop American lit, I had to drop film, I had to drop art, all things I was passionate about in high school (in addition to writing code).

I didn't work any less hard in my easier major. In fact I probably worked harder. A lot of my friends who also defected felt a similar sense of narrow scope in studying engineering.

While I do think a lot people drop engineering because it's hard, I think that a lot of people who are able and intelligent leave STEM fields because the fields themselves do nothing to try and encourage its students to develop outside interests. And those outside interests are important, they can be life changing.

Similarly, the liberal arts majors do NOT do enough to encourage its students to explore STEM subjects, which is just as horrible, in my opinion.

I'm glad there are other film/tv people on the board sharing their perspective. Before I started writing code for a living, I used to work in post production in NYC on reality tv shows and also in the past on films, docs, and also at more artistic-minded places like Sundance (which is a great place but very much tied to Hollywood, btw, if it wasn't already obvious). A lot of my friends (and myself) are hustling to get their films made here in the city so I must agree that the amount of money required to get a film made is a lot less than it once was.

The real difficulty, and what needs to change, in my opinion, is creating an avenue for independent producers to show their content and STILL have it be considered worth watching. In a way YouTube and Vimeo lets you put your work online which immediately makes it available to a billion people. The problem, though, is that having your work shown on youtube means nothing. Having your work screened on TV means something. Being screen in a theatre means something. Getting into Cannes means something. Having Ebert review your film means something. You can argue that Eberts opinion doesn't mean much, but the fact that he is reviewing your work is meaningful in and of itself.

Hollywood has this huge system to help itself legitimize the work that comes out of it, regardless of the actual quality. There's no real system that helps individuals who want to cut out the middle man effectively convince strangers to watch their content (afaik). There has been an insane amount of growth in the number of film festivals that exist in the last 5 years, but all that does is lessen the value of screening your film in a festival. (Wanna see? Just check out withoutabox.com). Also it's just growth that in my opinion tries to emulate and validate the current system.

So what I think is needed is something like Netflix, or a bunch Netflix-type sites, that serve curated and independently produced shows and films. Each site would serve a specific audience, and each site must be careful in what it chooses to show. It must legitimize itself to "normals" as a valid mode of entertainment, and also to artists and filmmakers as a valid mode of distribution. This, I believe, would allow for more diversity and more democracy in content creation, and is a viable way to legitimize quality content that would otherwise get lost in a sea of Internet junk.

Edit: grammar and some messed up sentences that didn't make sense :)

For me, the physicality of the book, the object itself, serves as a reminder of the knowledge gained from reading it.

When I can easily browse my bookshelf in actual physical three dimensional space, it's easier for me to move backwards and forwards through thoughts and ideas that I have acquired from those books, thoughts that otherwise would get easily buried in digital layers of organization.

Don't get me wrong--I am pro e-book. I have many in my collection. While technology allows me to simplify many things and aggregate diverse objects to a single place, it doesn't solve or simplify how I organize books (and to me books represent hundreds of hours of invested time and education). To say that with an e-book everything is at my fingertips is somewhat misleading. The organization of a physical library still beats the organization of my books in Kindle or iBooks or any of the number of programs I've tried. And for a lot of my comics and art books, the dimensions of the paper itself is part of the final product.

Maybe I'm old fashioned, or maybe when I have touchscreen wallpaper I'll consider switching over to completely digital.

Embarrassed to still be on Godaddy when I vowed to move away a few years ago. And timing is unfortunate. I just paid them lots of $$ to renew everything.

Still, biting the bullet and (finally) transferring everything over now.

Agreed. It's hard to switch gears from being head deep in back end code to thinking about and approaching a problem in terms of design. Maybe if you can spend one day coding and the next designing...

Unless I'm working for myself I find I rarely have this freedom. This is why I left my last startup. If I'm trying to do both there are too many things that I'm accountable for on a daily basis to the boss, who in my experience doesn't want me to stop coding to "waste a day" designing.

And in the end I feel like I just end up doing a half-assed job on both. More power to those who can do the switcheroo, be excellent in both, and keep the writer-of-paychecks happy!

I disagree, I think HAML is so much easier to read. It's easier to see nested blocks and where everything lies. I even started nesting my html when I go back to update old projects in order to look more like haml.

I liked the article, though I do think he over-generalizes a diverse subculture full of both crusading, idealistic boys and girls as well as truly despicable characters. Regardless it does put into words ideas and feelings we have all had for awhile, or at least he tried.

Being post-emotional myself (I guess), I have no real opinion to add other than another observation that once again holds true: that the comments about the article here on Hacker News has been a way better discussion on the topic than the comments on the NYTimes site. Why is the NYTimes always so behind the curve?