4 ms·

I think you're half joking, but you're 100% right. I think it's really important to maintain a balance between hacking and a healthy social life, but not just

by blhack 16y ago

I think you're half joking, but you're 100% right. I think it's really important to maintain a balance between hacking and a healthy social life, but not just because going out for drinks and laughs is fun. It's important to spend time with people who aren't hackers because, a lot of times, you're building stuff for people who aren't hackers. Gabriel Weinberg (Duck Duck Go founder, cool freaking guy IMHO) posted a list here a while ago of projects that he had started that he considered failures. One of these things was a photo-sharing service wherein users simply emailed pictures to an address if they wanted to share them. This is brilliant, I don't know why it never caught on. This is also the type of thing that my hacker friends and I would never have come up with. If I want to share a photo, I'll just scp it to a webserver and send you a link. Email it? That seems awfully cumbersome! Not to my mom it wouldn't. Obviously the big reason to keep a social life is because it's fun, friends are friends. I guess what I mean is that it's important to not think like a hacker sometimes.

jpwagner 16y ago
I get your point but "...it's important to not think like a hacker sometimes" made me chuckle because it implies that a hacker misses obvious things.
- blhack 16y ago
  The example of the email thing seems pretty obvious to me.
- chipsy 16y ago
  Well, they do. That's the consequence of knowing something. Because you are "literate" in solutions based on reusing prior working knowledge(as in the "host photos on own web server" solution) you will fail to see a problem for the tech-illiterate layperson. This has some crossover with the "tech-elitist" trap as well. The intense focus of writing software tends to make people forget about a well-rounded life - and the more you are involved with computers instead of people, the more likely you are to look down upon people who cannot live in the computer world.

by blhack 16y ago

jpwagner 16y ago

I get your point but "...it's important to not think like a hacker sometimes" made me chuckle because it implies that a hacker misses obvious things.

blhack 16y ago
The example of the email thing seems pretty obvious to me.
chipsy 16y ago
Well, they do. That's the consequence of knowing something. Because you are "literate" in solutions based on reusing prior working knowledge(as in the "host photos on own web server" solution) you will fail to see a problem for the tech-illiterate layperson. This has some crossover with the "tech-elitist" trap as well. The intense focus of writing software tends to make people forget about a well-rounded life - and the more you are involved with computers instead of people, the more likely you are to look down upon people who cannot live in the computer world.