
Lazy people innovate - aggarwalachal
http://ach.al/1z
======
superasn
Larry Wall once reputedly said: "The three attributes of a programmer are;
impatience, laziness and hubris". He didn't mean that hackers sit around in
front of the TV or wasting their time, that they're too impatient to sit down
and take some time to do anything, or so hubristic that they can't listen to
other ideas. All three of these attributes have negative connotations, but all
are meant in a positive way.

Hackers are impatient as they don't want to hang around wasting time when they
could be solving the "real" problem. They don't want to be jumping through
pointless political hoops before they can get to real work.

They are lazy because they don't want to have to type in the same command 50
times with small variance in the command - they write a script to do it for
them. This script is by far the better solution, not only saving time now, but
saving time in the future and expanding the hackers experience and knowledge.

Hackers are hubristic not because they think their ideas are the best, or they
can do anything. Far from it, hackers are very often very deferential to
other, more senior hackers, and very often use other "good" solutions as part
of their own. You need to have some sort of hubris to actually start a bit of
work in the first place. Without hubris, the Linux kernel probably would never
have been started.

[1] <http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?UsersAreSmarterThanProgrammers>

~~~
kenmazy
That's funny, I interpreted what he said a bit differently for "impatience"
and "hubris". To me, impatience and hubris go hand in hand for a good hacker.

Impatience: Why is this code taking so long?

Hubris: I could write code that is way faster/better than this!

------
tiatia
"I divide my officers into four groups. There are clever, diligent, stupid,
and lazy officers. Usually two characteristics are combined. Some are clever
and diligent -- their place is the General Staff. The next lot are stupid and
lazy -- they make up 90 percent of every army and are suited to routine
duties. Anyone who is both clever and lazy is qualified for the highest
leadership duties, because he possesses the intellectual clarity and the
composure necessary for difficult decisions. One must beware of anyone who is
stupid and diligent -- he must not be entrusted with any responsibility
because he will always cause only mischief." Kurt von Hammerstein-Equordn
(German General)

~~~
kator
That's an awesome quote. I couldn't agree more. lazy and clever people find
ways to solve problems that most people never try because they are too clever.
But at the same time these clever/lazies will spend 100's of hours trying to
solve a problem that can be done 10 times in 10 hours. But once they break
through they can do it in 10 seconds and laugh as they click in joy and laugh
at the fool who is still doing it in 10 hours... :)

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jiggy2011
This isn't lazy so much as efficient, you are swapping manual effort for
mental effort.

For example.

Go to a lazy person's house and the whole place is a mess; Go to a diligent
persons house and it is very tidy, because they clean everything top to
bottom. Go to an engineer's house and they have arranged everything so that it
can be made reasonably clean in under 30 mins.

~~~
saraid216
Oh, that's because building a robot to automate house-cleaning is still kinda
hard.

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eslachance
Misattributed to Bill Gates: "I will always choose a lazy person to do a
difficult job, because he will find an easy way to do it". I'm not sure who
that's actually from, but the idea behind it is the same. However, one has to
remember that to innovate while being lazy isn't actually simple. I won't go
out of my way to make something cool and innovative because, well, I'm lazy.
It's only when it saves _me_ time and I absolutely have to do it, that I'll
come up with great ideas (as "S" did when faced with her favorite toy).

~~~
sageikosa
Reminds me that crawling isn't a recognized developmental step, but directed
movement is. Seemed little "S" has pretty good command of directed movement,
by moving her target to herself.

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b_emery
> The one who invented multiplication did not want to add numbers all life

Reminds me of favorite fact from 'The Information'. The original use of
logarithms was by human 'computers', literally, people paid to run the
calculations to fill tables, which were then printed and sold in books. They
used them to turn difficult multiplication and division problems into simpler
addition and subtraction (reducing error and effort apparently). Sometimes I
think math should be taught with much more historical context!

~~~
tikhonj
It's funny because I recently used logarithms for _exactly_ that, just on a
computer.

Basically, if you're using a naive Bayes classifier, you may have to multiply
_really_ small probabilities. Floating point numbers are not great at
multiplying really small numbers. So the trick is to take the logarithm of the
probabilities and add them together.

~~~
b_emery
Very cool! Would not have thought of that.

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danso
I'd rather spend 29 minutes coding a solution to a repetitive 30-minute task,
even if it required more brainwork than just going through the motions. At
least I'm getting some experience out of the grunt work.

~~~
adamio
I've found these 29 minute solutions can often be re-purposed and reused
beyond the original intent, in even more innovative ways.

~~~
danso
Yep, that goes without saying :). But even if the actual code/module never
gets reused, writing something similar will take much less time in the future,
even from scratch...which is good because I'm not quite yet lazy enough to
abstract code as I write it...

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jstalin
Read the book "Thinking, fast and slow." We are genetically programmed (as are
all living things) to conserve energy and make things easier for ourselves. I
guess the author could more accurately replace "lazy" with "make things
easier" and be more accurate. It drives everything we do as human beings, from
politics (read Frederic Bastiat's works) to everyday lives (driving instead of
walking to work, choosing to type rather than write a note).

It's the people who realize "this could be done more easily" that innovate. I
guess lazy is just a simpler way of saying it.

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grassclip
Laziness definitely drives people to innovation, but being bored with what's
currently being done is another indicator of an innovator. I would almost say
even more so because laziness implies no wanting to do something.

~~~
j_baker
...and it makes you wonder what they _will_ do to not do something.

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Zenst
Lazy people plan more and in that are more likely to find the optimal
solution.

They also put of things and alot of tasks negate themselfs or were redundant
to start with. Manager asking for a report say. You could do it then and drop
other things or you could leave it and if it is important you will get chassed
up for it. If this happens alot a lazy person will write a script to do it,
not tell said manager and gain from it. Others do the script, tell the manager
and then get workbombed for no extra return. Lazy is in many ways another word
for smart. Thing is though when you say lazy, most people think of poor
hygiene, says alot about them mostly.

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kator
My physics teacher in high school used to say inventors are insane. They
invest 100x the time to solve a problem then it would take to just do the
work. But they are so happy when they can do it in 1/10th the time when they
have their new invention.

Meanwhile everyone watches in horror as the inventor spends all that time
looking for the solution thinking how insane the inventor is because they
could just "do the work already".

~~~
frugalfirbolg
“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists
in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the
unreasonable man.” George Bernard Shaw

Hopefully your physics teacher also made a point similar to this: Even if it
takes the inventor 10 years to automate something that takes a worker one day
to do, it can benefit everyone in the long run if that task is done often and
on a large scale.

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AsylumWarden
If lazy people really do innovate then I am surely the god of innovation. One
day I will actually make the effort to lift my hands and do something besides
flip the channel with my TV remote.

Seriously though, I get what the writer is talking about though I would think
it is more of a desire for efficiency. I don't want to keep writing the same
code repeatedly but that isn't really laziness.

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arihant
Innovation comes more from impatient people, not lazy people. There is very
wide gap between impatient and the lazy. The guy who invented multiplication
wasn't lazy (as mentioned in the article, or else he won't do work for
invention, which is always harder than adding numbers), but he probably did it
because he couldn't wait long enough for all the answers he wanted.

------
amix
One of my computer scientist professors once said: "A good computer scientist
solves problems. A great computer scientist creates tools that solve
problems."

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mnicole
In a similar vein, I attribute my passion for UX and design to my stupidity; I
need things to be as straight-forward/easy/friendly as possible. I can be
pretty annoying to be around when a process (airports, business protocols,
etc.) don't make sense or are much more difficult than they need to be, but
sometimes things are so backwards you wonder how anything gets done at all.

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bestest
I would read the post, but it's quite unreadable on my Chrome run on Windows.
Understandably, I would most definitely find numerous ways of making the text
readable for myself (copy paste to notepad, or disable CSS etc), but it's not
the point. That serif font is simply terrible.

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mitchi
<< Used Autohotkey to automate saving porn images to disk with Google Chrome.

Programmer laziness = You are doing something that annoys you because it's
slow so you take a whole day scripting and automating something that
accelerates it.

Ofc, didn't take me a day to do that.

~~~
frugalfirbolg
lol I have to ask, were you just using mouse-clicks, or did you have it pop
open the inspector and pull the images from there? Since you're on Windows,
you might want to check out the System.Net.WebClient object in Powershell.

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satori99
Heinlen did it already...

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_Enough_for_Love#The_Tale_o...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_Enough_for_Love#The_Tale_of_the_Man_Who_Was_Too_Lazy_to_Fail)

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h3rmitcrab
Lazy people sit on their asses and do nothing. It is the smart people who
innovate. Please do not promote the culture of laziness.

~~~
pilgrim689
I'm totally with you on this. People are confusing laziness with efficiency
and smarts.

When someone works to make work more efficient, he is still working! By
definition, a lazy person is unwilling to work (and that includes work that
optimizes work).

I'd hire a smart hard-working developer over a smart lazy one any day.

~~~
unimpressive
> I'd hire a smart hard-working developer over a smart lazy one any day.

[http://mail.linux.ie/pipermail/social/1999-October/000483.ht...](http://mail.linux.ie/pipermail/social/1999-October/000483.html)

I'm just going to leave that here...

~~~
pilgrim689
Showing me this clearly demonstrates the confusion of semantics I`m talking
about...

Charles, from the parable, is just smarter than Alan. Alan wasn't able to find
the simple efficient solution and thought the problem was so complex he had to
hire three more employees. He's just an idiot.

If you're showing me the article because "yea but Charles played Space
Invaders, so he's lazy!". Well, an employee who would have done exactly what
Charles did without playing Space invaders would have been a better person to
hire...and _that_ is my point.

~~~
unimpressive
>If you're showing me the article because "yea but Charles played Space
Invaders, so he's lazy!". Well, an employee who would have done exactly what
Charles did without playing Space invaders would have been a better person to
hire...and that is my point.

Well yeah. I think you're the one missing the semantics here.

Part of the point was that Charles _was_ working for quite a bit longer than
his supervisor thinks he did. Besides the space invaders (Which was poor form,
and something I would never dream of doing on an hourly wage.) he was in fact
_planning out the program._ (See the time spent scribbling notes.) It just
didn't look like it because he wasn't creating a huge fanfare surrounding the
process. Alan jumped right in with some hazy OOP sketches and sort of "hacked
it out by committee." as he went along.

He's lazy because he thought about the problem instead of doing the
"straightforward" OOP, headache inducing four module style design favored by
Alan.

~~~
pilgrim689
>la·zy/ˈlāzē/ >Adjective:

>-Unwilling to work or use energy: "he was too lazy to cook".

>-Characterized by lack of effort or activity.

And now you're telling me he's lazy because he "thought about the problem",
"worked for quite a bit longer than his supervisor thought" and " _planned out
the program_ ". What do foresight and smarts have to do with being unwilling
to work?

~~~
unimpressive
> And now you're telling me he's lazy because he "thought about the problem",
> "worked for quite a bit longer than his supervisor thought" and "planned out
> the program". What do foresight and smarts have to do with being unwilling
> to work?

It's a reference to this:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Virtues_of_a_Programmer#V...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Virtues_of_a_Programmer#Virtues_of_a_programmer)

If you feel that these usages are entirely too subversive, go yell at Larry.

~~~
pilgrim689
Larry Wall doesn't get to change the definition of laziness. His definition
which explains a lazy person as going through "great efforts", fully
"documenting what you wrote" and writing "labor-savor programs" goes against
all definitions found in English dictionaries.

This is laziness: "inactivity resulting from a dislike of work."[1] Please
note: it says "inactivity", not "activity". What Larry Wall is describing is
just being an efficient and smart programmer. But calling it "laziness" is
funnier and fits with the three-weaknesses-that-are-really-virtues joke he has
going.

[1] <http://wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn?s=laziness>

~~~
Shamanmuni
It's a little more complex than you present it. You only get to think of Alan
as inefficient because you know what Charles did in a similar situation.
However, if you only knew what Alan did you'd say he was smart and efficient.

He did everything he was expected to do and some more, a very industrious guy.
He didn't seem bothered about doing a complicated design, writing lots of
code, coordinating the other developers and the testers, revising the code
several times and maintaining it. He wasn't lazy at all.

On the other hand, probably Charles didn't want to do all that stuff. He just
wanted to write as little code as possible with as few bugs as possible and be
done with it, no maintenance at all. And that required thinking very carefully
and deeply about the problem he had to solve in order to get it right and
write the necessary code.

In trying to do as little work as possible and return to Space Invaders, he
had to be smart and efficient. That's the lesson here, great hackers use their
brains and write great code to solve their problems with the absolute minimum
amount of work required. It's really about laziness.

~~~
pilgrim689
Would you hire a Charles, or would you hire a CharlesPrime who does exactly
the same thing as Charles minus all the time spent playing space invaders at
work?

~~~
Shamanmuni
But Charles wasn't just wasting his time, he was thinking about the problem
while playing games! At least that's my interpretation.

I've learnt that I concentrate wonderfully and solve problems while walking. I
know other people see just a guy walking in an absent-minded way, but I'm
working!

For me Charles and CharlesPrime are exactly the same example, they just do the
same thing in different ways. If it isn't Space Invaders then it will be
another thing, they both need time to think. Otherwise you are hiring code
monkeys.

~~~
pilgrim689
Again, we'll just leave it as is, because I still think you have the
definition of "lazy" wrong. A lazy person doesn't play Space Invaders to
_think_ , he plays Space Invaders to _avoid working_ (as per the definition of
"lazy").

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soyabean
I'm reminded of the quote:

"If necessity is the mother of invention, then laziness must be the father"

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supergrowth
We at www.RealEstateDealStreet.com think that it is not laziness make them
innovative but time they spent on thinking make them innovative and lay man
thinks that thinking as laziness.

