barce

Hood.ie is open source, and your code is not. Any chance you can open source your code?

This is simply crazy talk. He creates a list of genuine issue, e.g. over-engineering and slaps them under the moniker of "because TDD."

I don't know how many times production was saved because there was an automated test written via TDD that prevented bad code from going out. Too many times to count.

What the author is suggesting is to throw this out and go back to the days of broken production apps are okay. This has never bothered Facebook, and it will definitely bother engineers who want to take pride in their work.

You still end up ahead since you can day trade yourself into a higher income bracket.

Facebook will be more than happy to get a piece of VK's users.

This is pretty much standard procedure. Depending on his contract, it saves github from paying severance.

I still think a lottery ticket is still has far worse ROI, than the YCombinator application and startup process.

Let's say you pony up rent for your YCombinator startup and are paying about $2400 / month + utilities for 3 months. Let's say you get your food & other necessities costs to $80 / week.

That's an $8160 investment.

What you get back are the weekly dinners with great speakers. The connections you make should be worth at least $150k if your startup fails and you have to use that connection to get a job. I'm assuming a markup in your value as an employee for just getting into YCombinator.

$8160 and you can make 20% - 35% more than your peers if it fails.

$8160 in lottery tickets will pretty much get you zero if you fail.

You're forgetting interest so it isn't a straight calculation like above. :)

"Summers and DeLong focused their presentation on the new communication technologies that were already reducing the marginal (per-unit) cost of producing and sending information goods to near zero."

Yes, sending an email can be free.

But the infrastructure for the Internet? The article really ignored how many tax payer dollars went into different public institutions to make the Internet a reality, e.g. Big Government and universities.

In the future, people will not be measured by how productive they are. They will see that human organizations greater than 150 people are divorced from reality. Productivity will be considered a shared delusion held during the Age of Work.

Managers often ask me how they can make their workers more productive. What I cannot say is, "There is no productivity."

There is a book that goes into deconstructing productivity. It's called "How to Survive in an Organization" by James Heaphey. It's based on a generation's worth of study on organizations like corporations.

The law is very clear on discriminating against someone by virtue of race, gender and/or age in a work situation.

A lawyer could make a very good case just based on her side of the story for the law being broken.

Against the coder who undid her work because he was rejected by a woman, that is classic retaliation pure and simple. Most cases like this that don't go to court settle in the Valley for $250k. It's a million at a minimum in the Valley if it does go to court.

As far as the wife goes, there was so much innuendo in the article that I wasn't sure what to conclude. Was the wife suggesting she hook up with her husband because a happy husband would make the former employee's situation better? If so, another classic open and shut case.

By that logic they should ban Paypal, Dwolla, Gyft, Gowallet, Visa, and any other payment app. They clearly haven't, and I'm not sure how Bitcoin apps are any different. The point is they aren't acting rationally.

The strategy around paper seems pretty smart. Rather than re-design Facebook's mobile experience, they just created a new app to interface with it. Given the track record for re-designs simply failing and causing user revolt, this is very shrewd.

His twitter seems to suggest he really is into keeping up with the latest trends. https://twitter.com/satyanadella The article states there was a 5 month search. I'm glad they are hiring within the ranks.

This is a good thing to put in there. Crypto-currencies are prey to all the manipulations of exchanges 100 years ago. Ya, that's what happens when you create unregulated virtual gold. A trader explains it here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3787375

Ya, the Stossel Show on Fox re-aired at around the time of the spike and a Libertarian was telling a bunch of folks to get into Bitcoin. My hunch is this was more influential in getting ma & pop to invest in bitcoin given Fox's viewership.

This blog piece is not a taxonomy. A real taxonomy would provide sample taxa living or stuffed in formaldehyde.

At most, this piece is just a literary exercise that provides no solutions for the imaginary problems it suggests.

I would definitely change my opinion if facts were pointed to of actual projects and persons.

The grammar was atrocious. There were too many grammatical errors to list here, but for God's sake please use a grammar check. Paul Graham's grammar is perfect and yours should be, too.

Tools are designed for certain requirements. As the commenter, antimagic, noted, these requirements can conflict. A better tool would definitely have to sort out those conflicts, but at this point we're talking about something like AI.

To talk down the scope of lots of projects, I've always educated a client by saying if certain types of thinking were automated then we'd have to say we were creating AI and that the cost of the project would grow exponentially.

There's also a huge cost in supporting subscribers. I worked at 2 startups that supported subscriptions, and at least 50% of support was just around that. No subscribers at this point means keeping support costs the same instead of doubling them.

How is driving similar enough to coding? You can take 2 coding projects and the times for a team to complete them and their estimates will differ wildly. Commuting on the 280 to Palo Alto from San Francisco is 45 minutes on average. There is nothing mysterious about this or complicated. Coding is much harder and the OP is guilty of a bad analogy fallacy.

If two comapanies look like they are doing the same thing and one fails and one succeeds, I'd have to conclude that there wasn't enough measurement (lean startup measurement) to make apparent the difference.

"In particular, don’t found a startup with people that are busy with school, have personal issues, are traveling, or are working a full-time job." I'd like to know if there is anybody without personal issues, or what the author is trying to say in this context.

Yes, I think a podcast would work for commuters who are coders - definitely the right form factor.

Right now it seems there's a great interest in building mobile apps, even if they are just web based. Ideally, I'd like to use the time commuting to learn on a mobile device or tablet. This is exactly where existing systems like Khan Academy & Codeacademy are falling short, but they are still really excellent systems. Thanks for teaching those classes, I went to a few of them and learned lots.

I also liked the idea of "Dark Pattern" that he linked and introduced.

You can get a permit for this and do it legally: http://www.parksconservancy.org/visit/tours/golden-gate-brid...

You are in the pride of lions. You do not know it yet. What many coders don't realize is how much power they actually have.

You are the lion and the resources of the company are the gazelle. It's time to feast!

It's really a good time to:

1) ask for a raise for more "effort"

2) ask for more budget

3) that new computer they've been holding out on.

Ya, you can ditch that 17" laptop from 2006. ;) Just ask!

We know that throwing resources into the game this late doesn't work, but it's good to have that extra budget for later just in case you wildly do succeed.

"Because you can only click ‘Recommend’ 10 times in a day, you can’t go gallavanting about throwing them hither and thither; they are to be reserved for the photos which you think other users should see."

This just puts the problem somewhere else.

Now, the new problem is a follower becoming "a flawed" currency. People who try to bot likes will now bot followers to get more likes.

Ya, I got my info from Holman. My info's old.

Ya, I've been the victim of "couldn't balance a B-Tree fast enough so you're not hired but you'll never see a B-Tree at work."

You mention that there isn't a better solution. IMHO, I disagree.

I think Github has figured out a way. They've been around 5 years and haven't fired anybody and nobody has quit.

Most firings are due to a job / job skill mismatch. At Github, they do a week long paid interview so both sides really know what they're getting into.

I don't work at Github, but am such a fan of their company.