
How I Hacked My Husband's Programming Addiction - mck-
http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/suzanne-ma/computer-programming-women-html500-vancouver_b_4739610.html?utm_hp_ref=canada-british-columbia#306792682
======
smtddr
_> >"Damn it! I'm a human, not a boolean condition!" I'd declare, clearly
emotionally compromised._

This will probably be an unpopular comment on HN, but I think there are a lot
of vulcans[1] in the tech scene that would be more socially amiable & better
understand others if they stopped trying to exclusively use cold-logic on
people and understood that emotions are just as important as logic when
dealing with humans.

 _" All cruel people describe themselves as paragons of frankness."_ \-
Tennessee Williams

 _" Honesty without Compassion is Cruelty_"
[https://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20140121033617-3...](https://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20140121033617-36792-honesty-
without-compassion-is-cruelty)

1\.
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vulcan_(Star_Trek)](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vulcan_\(Star_Trek\))

~~~
wyager
If your goal is to manipulate people into doing what you want, then yes, you
should consider their emotional state above rational argument.

If your goal is to pursue the truth and make correct decisions, you must not
pay any heed whatsoever to the emotions of the person(s) you're trying to
reach a decision with. That is, you can try to be delicate, but you mustn't
allow their emotions to prevent the argument from being rational.

~~~
aninhumer
> That is, you can try to be delicate, but you mustn't allow their emotions to
> prevent the argument from being rational.

Trying to be delicate _is_ paying heed to their emotions, and this kind of
"manipulation" is an important part of communication. You are manipulating
them to follow the same thought process as you, so that they can understand
your (supposedly) rational conclusion, and if they respect you they will be
happily allow themselves to be manipulated in this way.

Completely ignoring their emotions is an excellent way to convince an
otherwise rational person to ignore your argument. People are not rational,
and being right is not sufficient to be persuasive.

------
smoyer
I missed the part where she hacked her husband's addiction ... what I heard is
that she went from being an enabler to a co-junkie.

On the other hand, my wife has said some of the same things about me. She
doesn't complain when I bring home a paycheck though, and she really does help
me stay "balanced enough".

~~~
sp332
"Hack" is a slang term that has many different meanings depending on the
context. Here it's a play on two different meanings: computer programming, and
coping with a situation.
[http://www.usingenglish.com/reference/idioms/can't+hack+it.h...](http://www.usingenglish.com/reference/idioms/can't+hack+it.html)

~~~
kristianp
And the article doesn't really match either of those reasons!

~~~
PhasmaFelis
Sure it does. She had a problem (not being able to share her husband's
interests), and instead of the obvious solution (pull him away from his
interests) she found a novel and better one (join him in his interests). It's
a perfect hack.

~~~
visakanv
so she "hacked" their relationship, not his addiction

~~~
kristianp
She didn't hack their relationship at all, that's my point. She learnt about
hacking and that's the closest the article got to the title.

~~~
visakanv
yeah, I agree with you- I wouldn't use the term 'hack' at all. Just that if we
had to use the term, the least bastardized way of doing it would be to say
that it was the relationship being modified, not his addiction. She literally
did nothing about his addiction. I suppose you could say she "hacked" (again,
disgusting choice of words) her PERCEPTION of his addiction...

either way, it's a poor choice of words

------
joesmo
I'm glad the author was open minded enough to try it herself and stop judging.
The other women she mentions sound like monsters who are unsupportive of their
husbands. If they were writing a book, I doubt anyone would make a big deal of
it, let alone write an article about it. I'd expect the wives to be supportive
or leave. Programming might be addictive, but it is productive. It's a far cry
from drinking or using drugs. Instead of trying to stop their spouses, perhaps
programmers' significant others should learn to embrace their spouses' work
just as one might try to embrace and support a writer they were married to.

To compare programming to drug addiction is unfair to both programmers and
addicts.

~~~
dragonwriter
> If they were writing a book, I doubt anyone would make a big deal of it, let
> alone write an article about it.

I doubt that. Complaints -- including articles, and whole books -- about
spouses being obsessed with their work or hobby rather to the point of
neglecting a spouse have been common for a lot longer than computer
programming. And writing and other arts have been _very_ well represented as
subjects of those complaints, far more than computer programming.

------
girvo
That's... Not really what an addiction is. And someone hiding my computer from
me because they've decided they don't like me programming? Well, that's just
odd...

All in all though, a decent motivational story -- although I wonder whether
it's a good thing for everyone to know enough programming to be dangerous: I
certainly wrecked our home computer a number of times while learning as a kid
;)

------
TulliusCicero
"I often see the effects of coding manifest in his daily habits and tasks: the
way he meticulously organizes his sock drawer and how he does the dishes using
the least amount of water and soap yet somehow achieves the highest level of
cleanliness."

"I commiserated with other women -- girlfriends and wives of computer
programmers who told me how their partners often forgot to eat, drink or go to
the bathroom."

I'm sorry lady, you're not married to a programmer, you're married to a robot.

"The task was to build a website in six hours. We were guided through the
basic concepts of HTML and CSS during two morning lectures led by teachers
from Vancouver's Lighthouse Labs, then we were let loose to start creating our
own projects."

"Organizers told me 60 per cent of the participants at the HTML500 were women.
Everyone had different reasons for choosing to spend their Saturday learning
computer science:"

Ah yes, the well-known computer science fields of HTML and CSS. Those aren't
even programming languages!

~~~
PhasmaFelis
> _Ah yes, the well-known computer science fields of HTML and CSS. Those aren
> 't even programming languages!_

If a kid gave you a crayon picture, would you throw it in her face for having
a shaky hand and a poor grasp of anatomy?

Everyone has to start somewhere. For a complete newbie, HTML works as well as
anything for teaching the basic idea of language grammar, and better than most
for giving immediate positive feedback.

~~~
TulliusCicero
"If a kid gave you a crayon picture, would you throw it in her face for having
a shaky hand and a poor grasp of anatomy?"

This analogy is awful, although I admit I was being a bit pedantic: my point
was that learning to use markup languages isn't "learning computer science,"
although it does qualify as learning software development.

I also thought the idea of "spending a Saturday learning computer science" to
be kind of funny. It's like if you spent a day making popsicle stick catapults
and described it as "spending a Saturday learning physics."

~~~
PhasmaFelis
I'm the king of the pedants over here, but mocking a newbie for making an
honest effort at trying something new and not quite having the terminology
down after her very first day is kinda lame. Yeah, her language is humorously
awkward, but she's getting out there and trying. We need to encourage this,
both as programmers and as scientists.

~~~
TulliusCicero
Or maybe we should discourage it instead, for job security purposes.

Yeah you're right, I just chortled when I read that bit.

------
arielweisberg
This looks like spam for learning to code dressed up as some kind of
supposedly true anecdote. One of these husbands is believable, but an entire
cluster?

------
mck-
Okay now, please be nice, she is really trying :) Sounds like PhasmaFelis is
the only one on this thread who got the point.

I think most of you here really enjoy what you do for a living. I can't be
certain, but I'd venture to guess that the tech industry scores the highest
when it comes to the happiness factor.

As for me personally -- having come from investment banking and consulting --
it was the best choice I made for my career and personal sanity. It was clear
to my wife how much happier I had become -- not working for some faceless
corporation and actually contributing tangible value to society.

Journalism is a noble, but unfortunately, a declining field. It is stagnant.
There isn't much funding [1]. I have been urging her to get involved with the
vibrant tech community, which she has been. When I told her that I was
volunteering at the HTML 500, she jumped at the opportunity -- and blogged
about it :) yes yes.. HTML is not _real_ programming (even though it is
probably the single technology that touches most people's lives) and yes, Lisp
does not have semicolons, but Javascript does, so there.

By the sounds of it, she seems to have finally garnered the curiosity and
drive to dive deeper in the rabbit hole. At least to give it a try, it might
not be for her, but she will understand me better. This kind of behaviour
should be condoned.

It is also her first time on Hacker News, so we should show her how great a
community this is (and that we are _not_ a bunch of pedants)!

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5324429](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5324429)

Edit: Now why did this post get penalized and bumped all the way to the third
page, where it was sitting in the Top 10 just 30 min ago?

~~~
salehenrahman
Kind of off topic, but people have been talking about "programming" their
remote control for a very long time. And what does it involve to "program"
your remote control? Simply going to the menu on your TV, and setting up some
of the buttons to carry out specific tasks.

Likewise, I really don't see how HTML _isn't_ programming. If anything, HTML
is a language that _programs_ the browser. It tells it _how_ to generate the
DOM tree. It's a declarative language. And lately, I've been seeing a rise in
declarative style. Look no further than Express.js, and its routes. You can
pass more than one callback functions per route, allowing you to specify
_what_ a route does in a more declarative manner.

So to everyone that have been saying that your wife isn't really programming,
I highly suggest that they re-evaluate what programming is. If they are still
convinced that HTML isn't programming, then at least they can be sympathetic
with her efforts to be more involved with what you are so passionate about.

------
vezzy-fnord
_Computer engineers go by a number of different stage names: they are software
developers, programmers, coders, hackers._

Computer engineering is an umbrella term, although it's usually implied that
they have an above-average understanding of hardware. It's not a synonym for
programmer.

 _Marc 's mind was a symphony of brackets, tags, semi-colons and logic
operators. To me, it was just noise._

Yet at the end she mentioned him specifically writing in Ruby (Rails) and
Common Lisp.

Otherwise, it was a decent sentimental story. I'm not particularly a fan of
emotionally manipulative glurge and I can't help but smirk at the whole "learn
to code = write markup" equivocation and the general try-hard tone, but it was
okay. I can see it being motivating.

~~~
Jtsummers
> _Computer engineering is an umbrella term, although it 's usually implied
> that they have an above-average understanding of hardware. It's not a
> synonym for programmer._

I've given up on explaining that to most people. My degrees are CS and Math. I
work in a software shop. There is hardware work being done, but mostly of the
"did we hook up the right cables?" sort of work. However, whenever I start
explaining that it's not engineering in the sense that they mean (which really
is the computer/electrical engineer sense) they start thinking I'm in IT.

~~~
boyaka
I gave a shot at it here:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6956528](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6956528)

------
Chromozon
"When we disagree on something, for example, he always presents the most
goddamned rational arguments laying them out in an obnoxiously coherent and
systematic way."

If politicians did this, the world would be a much better place.

~~~
lutusp
> If politicians did this, the world would be a much better place.

If politicians did that, they wouldn't be elected. The last approximation of
an intellectual to run for high office was Adlai Stevenson in the 1950s. The
voters didn't trust him -- he seemed to be too smart.

~~~
cperciva
_The last approximation of an intellectual to run for high office was Adlai
Stevenson in the 1950s._

In Canada, we had Michael Ignatieff -- former Harvard professor and holder of
11 honourary degrees -- as a "candidate for prime minister" in 2011. (We don't
elect our Prime Ministers directly, but the leader of the winning party
inevitably becomes Prime Minister, and polling has found that a lot of voting
is determined by whom voters would like to see become Prime Minister.)

Ignatieff led the Liberal party to a disastrous defeat, in large part because
whenever he was asked about an issue, he would respond by explaining in detail
the merits of two or three different positions -- and never quite say which
position he himself held.

It wasn't that he was too smart or that voters found him to be untrustworthy;
voters simply couldn't figure out what policies he believed in.

~~~
lutusp
I think there's a certain huckster and salesman instinct in successful
politicians, a base sense of how to appeal to common values that becomes
second nature, no rehearsal required. Lyndon Johnson had it in excess.

------
aredridel
Loathsome pop-psych, loathsome relationship pattern ... and redeemed by
turning it on its head. Well played. Had me hate-reading in the middle and
happy by the end.

------
emocakes
'How I stopped my husband making money so he could give me more attention, in-
turn creating the perfect future argument that we don't make enough money'

------
greatsuccess
Programmers know nothing of logic. This article is a fabricated advert like
most of HuffPo's content.

A true programming addict would even bother with the dishes.

Now Yahoo pay attention! if you could only insult the average persons
intelligence while selling ads that look like content! (oh wait)

~~~
greatsuccess
And while were broadsiding barns with the word "addict", lets take a moment to
reflect what addiction really is!. Phil Hoffman RIP.

