Perfectionism

Created: 2015-08-04
Status: notes

Some vaguely related threads about perfectionism, short term vs long term, etc.

• math psets: “easy to do, hard to write up”

• computer security; user solipsist comments:

  The market doesn’t support secure software. The expensive part isn’t writing the software – it’s inspecting for defects meticulously until you become confident enough that defects which remain are sufficiently rare. If a firm were to go though the expense of producing highly secure software, how could they credibly demonstrate to customers the absence of bugs? It’s a market for lemons.

• writing poetry: sum of creativity on reddit

  maybe reddit’s creativity sum is greater than anything that can be produced by a single human being. but yet reddit can’t make it coherent, it can’t polish it. but a poet can polish their work many times over. it’s the same as in programming, writing the YC post, doing math psets, etc etc etc.

  ppl criticize perfectionism, but polishing has a quality of its own

• writing yc post

• Brian Tomasik in Is It Better to Blog or Formally Publish? | Essays on Reducing Suffering:

  Currently I incline against publishing in academia most of the time, since I find that it takes a lot of effort to write papers in the style that a journal demands, while the payoff from having a journal publication isn’t necessarily that big unless you’re trying to get tenure. However, if you can get funding by being a grad student, the cost-benefit calculation changes and may make academic publishing a good idea.

• programming: “over-engineering” something; and of course Facebook’s famous “move fast and break things; if you’re not breaking things you’re not moving fast enough” etc.¹

• 4chan – HN’s take on php code

  treehau5:

  I mean,

  Yes I hate PHP more than the next guy,

  Yes this code is terrible,

  But you know what? I can read it, and follow along. And that’s actually more to say than other “beautiful” code that was obfuscated behind 3 or 4 levels of unnecessary levels of abstraction or indirection.

  dewey:

  And yet, despite the horrible code, it’s still powering an Alexa Top 500 page without any huge problems I’ve heard of.

  TheAceOfHearts:

  I think this just goes to show that you can have a lot of popularity even if your code is just sorta glued together.

  • of course, the opposite is suckless’s philosophy
• 80-20 rule
• semantic web; impatience
• same with semantic web: the market won’t accept it because people don’t wanna put in the work

• same with archiving things

Tags: content creation, long-term thinking, longnow.

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