There's also the idea of structured procrastination, [1] which turns procrastination into a productivity tool. It's based on the insight that an unpleasant task may become attractive when seen as a way to procrastinate on something even more unpleasant. For a true procrastinator it means working productively on tasks #2..n instead of reading Hacker News thinking "one last article and then I'll start working on task #1". It's an excellent way to avoid getting stuck in a vicious cycle of procrastination, and calling it "hidden procrastination" is unnecessarily negative.

http://www.structuredprocrastination.com/

I think this point is not stressed enough whenever this subject comes up. A person who spends all his free time reading CS research papers and experimenting with different solutions to problems he encounters in his field is not passionate by this standard if he doesn't have a pet _project_ to show at the interview.

I'd treat that at least as well as a pet project, and possibly more so.

> Validation is contextual; what validation you apply is dependent on the source of the data.

> Often in an API we are more restrictive than we may be in a user interface, demanding that everything be specified explicitly. In a UI we may assist the user by filling in values on their behalf. The specifics of this depend on the UI and the objects in question.

> At the same time, we are often more restrictive in a UI. For instance, we may demand that the user enter something that appears to be a valid phone number. But for historical reasons, we may not make that demand for objects that already exist, or we may put in a tight restriction on the UI keeping in mind that it can more easily be relaxed and refined than a restriction in the domain objects or underlying database. Also, we may trust the programmer to use the API in a reasonable way, but we seldom trust user data in the same way.

-- http://formencode.org/Design.html#validation-as-directional-...

Lately I've even played with the idea that maybe Clojure style strict separation of data and functions is just taking the single responsibility principle of OO design to it's ultimate conclusion as the responsibilities of storing a piece of data in memory and the responsibility of deriving new data from it are separated...

If your code uses a lot of new utilities, some readers may complain that it is hard to understand. People who are not yet very fluent in Lisp will only be used to reading raw Lisp. In fact, they may not be used to the idea of an extensible language at all. When they look at a program which depends heavily on utilities, it may seem to them that the author has, out of pure eccentricity, decided to write the program in some sort of private language.

All these new operators, it might be argued, make the program harder to read. One has to understand them all before being able to read the program. To see why this kind of statement is mistaken, consider the case described on page 41, in which we want to find the nearest bookshops. If you wrote the program using find2, someone could complain that they had to understand the definition of this new utility before they could read your program. Well, suppose you hadn’t used find2. Then, instead of having to understand the definition of find2, the reader would have had to understand the definition of find-books, in which the function of find2 is mixed up with the specific task of finding bookshops. It is no more difficult to understand find2 than find-books. And here we have only used the new utility once. Utilities are meant to be used repeatedly. In a real program, it might be a choice between having to understand find2, and having to understand three or four specialized search routines. Surely the former is easier.

So yes, reading a bottom-up program requires one to understand all the new operators defined by the author. But this will nearly always be less work than having to understand all the code that would have been required without them.

If people complain that using utilities makes your code hard to read, they probably don’t realize what the code would look like if you hadn’t used them. Bottom-up programming makes what would otherwise be a large program look like a small, simple one. This can give the impression that the program doesn’t do much, and should therefore be easy to read. When inexperienced readers look closer and find that this isn’t so, they react with dismay.

We find the same phenomenon in other fields: a well-designed machine may have fewer parts, and yet look more complicated, because it is packed into a smaller space. Bottom-up programs are conceptually denser. It may take an effort to read them, but not as much as it would take if they hadn’t been written that way.

"So yes, reading a bottom-up program requires one to understand all the new operators defined by the author. But this will nearly always be less work than having to understand all the code that would have been required without them."

Here's the problem: it's hard to build good abstractions. Every abstraction has a cost and an overhead in learning it, getting used to it, managing the cognitive overhead. The binary black-and-white phrasing of this argument utterly sidesteps any mention of the tradeoffs involved. Most abstractions we encounter in real-world code fail to take into account the cost of using an abstraction. You built it, you're used to it, you can't empathize with others who need to learn it.

Here's my stab at articulating the tradeoffs: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2329613

Common Lisp is a great language, but it's littered with crappy abstractions: too many kinds of equality http://www.nhplace.com/kent/PS/EQUAL.html, an inability to override or extend coerce, redundant control abstractions like keyword args to reverse traversal order (http://dreamsongs.com/Files/PatternsOfSoftware.pdf, pages 28-30), the list goes on and on.

I see that in my code all the time: my abstractions tend to suck until I use them myself, at which point I fix them.

The problem is, we often have to build abstractions that others will use before we use them ourselves. At that point we're kinda stuck, because the necessary changes will break code, and that's scary.

I'm an environmental studies major. I've read stuff that indicates that plants "scream" when harmed (emit a pulse which humans can't detect but which other plants can) and they also communicate to other plants about dangers in the area (such as insects chewing on them and harming them).

Curious as to how far you think we should take this stand against "speciesism". (EDIT: I mean, for example, should we protest that the sheep are stepping on and eating the grass? I'm sure the grass doesn't much appreciate it -- and, no, I am not being facetious.)

My personal point of view is that I do not want to cause any suffering when I can avoid doing so (i.e. when my survival does not depend on it). Only a conscious being can suffer, and, as far as I know, plants are not conscious. There are organisms of all levels of complexity between single-cell organisms and homo sapiens, and no-one knows for sure where true consciousness begins, but the line between things and beings needs to be drawn somewhere. I have personally drawn the line between plants and animals, just to be on the safe side. It may be too far, and there's a risk that I'm not using some things for fear of causing suffering to a conscious being, but I'm OK with that.

Can they feel fear and pain in a way that we can comprehend? Almost certainly not.

I personally think this is a silly argument: Just because we are unable to perceive their suffering doesn't mean it isn't real. Lots of animals also have senses that are quite different from humans: Carrier pigeons sense something we cannot which helps them navigate, hammerhead sharks sense electrical fields that most humans cannot (though my understanding is some humans are more sensitive to this than others), and elephants communicate over long distances using very low sound waves that humans cannot hear. Does the fact that humans fail to perceive these things invalidate them? I don't think so.

I think your lifestyle choice is admirable. But I don't see any real reason to hold animals as somehow more sacred (for lack of a better word) than plants. Or to view this in moral terms per se. (FWIW, a lot of people often interpret things I say/advocate as "moral" whereas in many cases I would classify them as merely "pragmatic".)

Peace.

Peremptory answer redacted for inherent biases: Dogs are our slaves. Sheep are our murder victims.

Somewhat sympathetic answer: Sheep naturally flock together. The dogs just reshape and redirect the flock. "Dog-broke" sheep, as mentioned in the article, are used to the dogs and know they are not to be feared.

Sympathy-trumping counter-answer: given the steady destruction of sustainable farming practices in the face of agribusiness hegemony, why begrudge the local shepherds any extra source of income? At least these sheep aren't growing up in a tiny stall in a factory farm.

Re: Somewhat sympathetic answer: I thought the reason sheep can be herded by a dog at all is that they are timid and easily frightened, and think of the dog as a predator. If they weren't afraid, they wouldn't defend themselves by flocking.

Re: Sympathy-trumping counter-answer, economic argument: In my opinion moral concerns outweigh economic concerns. Your mileage may vary.

Re: Sympathy-trumping counter-answer, factory farm argument: Harming animals is not justified by the fact that they could have been harmed even more. (Replace "animals" with "people" for plenty of potential analogies. I resist the temptation to write any of them out for the fear of sounding like a troll.)

For the most part, moral consideration to animal suffering is a consequence of utilitarianism--the idea that all moral duties revolve around minimizing the amount of suffering and maximizing the amount of pleasure in the world[1]. Most moral philosophers who take animal rights seriously (chiefly among them Peter Singer, if you're familiar with the name) are utilitarians. But a utilitarian is absolutely willing to cause small amounts of suffering to alleviate larger amounts of suffering, because it's a net positive in the "pleasure calculus".[2]

If you're not a utilitarian, then suffering isn't a morally relevant concern and you base your morality on something else, usually some set of universal rules and principles governing interactions between people.[3] These rules and principles tend to be reciprocal by design, only governing how moral agents treat other moral agents. Sheep aren't capable of moral agency, so even from a deontological perspective you are unlikely to come up with any sort of moral duty not to herd sheep with dogs.

Let's be clear here: I'm sure you could rationalize some type of moral system where it's wrong to herd sheep with dogs, and I'm wary of this discussion turning into an exercise to do just that. But I don't think that's the type of moral system you would ever naturally arrive at if you weren't being tendentious about that specific point.

[1] This is a naive kind of utilitarianism: Mill's utilitarianism also takes into account the quality, not merely the quantity, of pleasure or suffering involved, and there have been further philosophical refinements, none of which change the basic point here.

[2] http://www.qwantz.com/index.php?comic=599

[3] The textbook example is Kant's categorical imperative: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Categorical_imperative

What bothered me about the article, and prompted my original, poorly worded, reply was the fact that dogs are treated with more empathy and respect than other kinds of animals (even to the extent of harming other animals to bring them joy). To me this humane attitude seems so intuitive that I feel like it is not so much consciously learned to be felt for dogs as suppressed for all other beings. I don't think there's anything special about dogs in particular since they are not given the same status in all cultures. It's not about their utility either (anymore): most people get dogs because they feel sympathy for them, and not the other way around.

As you seem to be knowledgeable about ethics, do you happen to know of any books that deal with this tendency of humans to strongly empathize with some animals while having no trouble harming others? I'd like to read more about the issue from any viewpoint, be it ethical, psychological, or cultural. I'd like to better understand my own, intuitive worldview, which departed from mainstream when I started thinking about these issues, as well as that of people who do not share it.

I'd investigate your assumption that being herded by dogs causes sheep any harm or suffering, though. It doesn't really seem that obvious to me that it would.

This isn't a popular viewpoint, and it's counterintuitive to people who have been raised to be affectionate towards animals (myself included), but you asked for a moral justification, not an emotional justification.

I think you're being downvoted because you're being overly sensitive to an imaginary problem. From reading the article, it sounds like the dogs are more likely to be harmed than the sheep.

I don't think the problem is imaginary, though. I still think it's schizophrenic to cause harm (in this case stress) to one kind of animal not out of necessity, but to bring happiness to another kind of animal -- even if the amount of harm is relatively minor compared to what could have been done. I have nothing against empathizing with dogs and trying to bring them happiness. On the contrary, I think it's illogical to restrict this attitude to dogs instead of extending it to all sentient beings, including sheep.

I think the sheep probably prefer getting herded to getting their legs broken. They probably also prefer it to getting eaten by a coyote, a not uncommon fate of lost sheep.