A naive query understands life as the attaining of some aim through the active creation of something of value

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Below is an excerpt from Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor E. Frankl.

Long ago we had passed the stage of asking what was the meaning of life, a naive query which understands life as the attaining of some aim through the active creation of something of value. For us, the meaning of life embraced the wider cycles of life and death, of suffering and of dying

Woe to him who saw no more sense in his life, no aim, no purpose, and therefore no point in carrying on. He was soon lost. The typical reply with which such a man rejected all encouraging arguments was, “I have nothing to expect from life any more.” What sort of answer can one give to that? What was really needed was a fundamental change in our attitude toward life. We had to learn ourselves and, furthermore, we had to teach the despairing men, that it did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us.

We needed to stop asking about the meaning of life, and instead to think of ourselves as those who were being questioned by life-daily and hourly. Our answer must consist, not in talk and meditation, but in right action and in right conduct. Life ultimately means taking the responsibility to find the right answer to its problems and to fulfill the tasks which it constantly sets for each individual. These tasks, and therefore the meaning of life, differ from man to man, and from moment to moment.
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By-products That Created Billions in Wealth

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To figure out what’s next (or where to), it’s useful as a thought exercise to know how we got here. Silicon Valley’s living legend Steve Blank shared his account of the valley’s “secret history“. It’s easy to forget that the fruits we enjoy today & billions of dollars in wealth has been created as a result of the military’s arms race.

In the 19th century, the development of the steam engine and the development of the British navy (and its imperial reach) moved hand in hand. In the 20th century, the United States was the engine of global technological development, and much of that innovation was funded and driven by military acquisitions, and almost all of that had some spin-off civilian application. The development of both aircraft and radios was heavily subsidized by the military and resulted in the subsequent birth of the airline industry and the broadcasting industry. The interstate highway system was first conceived of as a military project to facilitate the rapid movement of troops in case of Soviet attack or nuclear catastrophe. The microchip was developed for use in the small digital computers that guided both nuclear missiles and the rockets needed to put payloads in space. And of course the Internet, which entered public consciousness in the 1990s, began as a military communications project in the 1960s.

Wars are times of intense technological transformation, because societies invest—sometimes with extensive borrowing—when and where matters of life and death are at stake. The U.S.-jihadist war has driven certain developments in unmanned surveillance and attack aircraft as well as in database technology, but the profound transformations of World War II (radar, penicillin, the jet engine, nuclear weapons) and the Cold War (computers, the Internet, fiber optics, advanced materials) are lacking. The reason is that ultimately the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq are light-infantry wars that have required extrapolations of existing technologies but few game-changing innovations.

Emphasis above is mine. Put another way, if it weren’t for the “major” wars, could you imagine an alternate world today without computers, internet, wireless, GPS-reliant location-based mobile apps, all the companies born from this category (e.g. Google, Facebook, Microsoft), and all the jobs + productivity to society born from this category? That isn’t to say these couldn’t have been developed privately, though it’s hard to imagine how receptive VCs would to some guy who walks in their door with a business plan to throw a bunch of satellites up in space for check-in + restaurant review app.

From aircraft to nuclear power to moon flights to the Internet to global positioning satellites, the state is much better at investing in long-term innovation. The government is inefficient, but that inefficiency and the ability to absorb the cost of inefficiency are at the heart of basic research. When we look at the projects we need to undertake in the coming decade, the organization most likely to execute them successfully is the Department of Defense.

There is nothing particularly new in this intertwining of technology, geopolitics, and economic well-being. The Philistines dominated the Levantine coast because they were great at making armor. To connect and control their empire, the Roman army built roads and bridges that are still in use. During a war aimed at global domination, the German military created the foundation of modern rocketry; in countering, the British came up with radar. Leading powers and those contending for power constantly find themselves under military and economic pressure. They respond to it by inventing extraordinary new technologies.

Excerpts above are from the book “The Next Decade” by George Friedman.

I have many questions about the future, as I’m sure you all do:

  • Will technology as a result from commercial R&D by private funds ever impact humanity as much as it has R&D by the military?
  • In Friedman’s terms, what “new structure” (as opposed to “rearranging of furniture”) is being built today that will lay the groundwork for the next Google / Apple / Twitter? (And will it be a by-product of the military over-investing in response to a significant threat? What would that threat be?)

Cause and Effect Fallacy: The By-product Does NOT Make The Product

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This is a response to this front-page Hacker News thread with 157 upvotes at time of writing.

Mostly, I felt compelled to respond because:

  1. It’s a feel-good answer (got to love those!) It tells people what they want to hear, but not the truth
  2. Clever bait for good developers stuck in a bad situation
  3. The sheer number of good developers who seem to agree with this
  4. It’s patronizing

Disclosure: I write code as well.

I think this post suffers from a cause-and-effect fallacy + hindsight bias[1].

From The Pmarca Guide to Startups, part 4: The only thing that matters by Marc Andreessen:

If you ask entrepreneurs or VCs which of team, product, or market is most important, many will say team. This is the obvious answer, in part because in the beginning of a startup, you know a lot more about the team than you do the product, which hasn’t been built yet, or the market, which hasn’t been explored yet.

Plus, we’ve all been raised on slogans like “people are our most important asset” — at least in the US, pro-people sentiments permeate our culture, ranging from high school self-esteem programs to the Declaration of Independence’s inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness — so the answer that team is the most important feels right.

And who wants to take the position that people don’t matter?

(emphasis above is mine)

So the big question is, can you colossally mess up the by-product, and still achieve a great product? YES. I know that might be hard to hear but I’ll quote this pmarca post again:

When you get right down to it, you can ignore almost everything else.

I’m not suggesting that you do ignore everything else — just that judging from what I’ve seen in successful startups, you can.

Whenever you see a successful startup, you see one that has reached product/market fit — and usually along the way screwed up all kinds of other things, from channel model to pipeline development strategy to marketing plan to press relations to compensation policies to the CEO sleeping with the venture capitalist. And the startup is still successful.

Conversely, you see a surprising number of really well-run startups that have all aspects of operations completely buttoned down, HR policies in place, great sales model, thoroughly thought-through marketing plan, great interview processes, outstanding catered food, 30″ monitors for all the programmers, top tier VCs on the board — heading straight off a cliff due to not ever finding product/market fit.

Ironically, once a startup is successful, and you ask the founders what made it successful, they will usually cite all kinds of things that had nothing to do with it. People are terrible at understanding causation. But in almost every case, the cause was actually product/market fit.

If you’re a good developer stuck in a bad situation, there is hope. I acknowledge my bias since I’m in Silicon Valley, but I humbly think this is the best place, not just in the US, but in the world. Not just for startups, but for developers (who’re fine with working for big companies). You are highly valued, and you get paid top-dollar compared to anywhere else on the planet.

If you’re a good developer stuck in a bad situation, send me an email with your resume (and tell me what you’re looking for), and I’ll personally try to find you a good job, right here in the San Francisco Bay Area. No strings attached. I’m proud to be in Silicon Valley, having moved here 2 years ago, an immigrant to the US. For those outside: know that SV runs on a pretty obvious pay-it-forward culture, so I’m happy to pay it forward. A few pretentious “brogrammers” absolutely do NOT represent SV.

Success is decided by the market: you only succeed if users like what you’ve built. And users don’t care where you went to college.
—Paul Graham

I find it hard to believe that users would care about your company’s by-product.

Update: All this banter is in good spirit, I think Github is going to be an even greater company. I really do. All the best!

Update 2: Just to be clear, between a good by-product and bad by-product, clearly having the former is better. The point is that there’s no causation to the product. At least not in a significant way, because if it did, then all you’d have to do is just keep amplifying the good by-product until you hit the home-run success. Can you “good-culture” your way to an IPO? (Again, I’m not recommending bad culture—I wouldn’t work there either)

[1] At least I think the readers of that post might not be aware of the inherent hindsight-bias

This is a post in response to this post.

Django template filter: Add zero-width space to break up long strings

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Problem

You have some long text with no spaces (e.g. long words or long URLs) and it messes up your alignment in your small <TD> or <DIV>. Perhaps in this situation (such as in a URL), you don’t want to truncate (so that people can see the whole text), and you can’t break the long string with a dash (-) because that would make the URL incorrect if someone copied and pasted it.

Solution

Add a zero-width space in the long string.

The following Django filter will add a 0-width space every X chars. It’s easy to use!

Step 1

Inside of your Django app’s (not project) directory, make a directory called “templatetags”. Create a new file in this new directory, say “app_extras.py” (name it anything). Make this directory accessible as a python module by creating an empty file named __init__.py (also inside of this new directory).

Step 2

Make sure your Django app is listed on INSTALLED_APPS in settings.py

Step 3

In your html template, load the filter before using it like this: 

{% load app_extras %}

That’s it! Now you can use it like this (adds a 0-width space every 25 chars):

{{ some_long_word_with_no_breaks|zerowidthspace_separator:25 }}

Also shared here: http://djangosnippets.org/snippets/2822/