codinghorror

There are many ways to tell an incomplete, partial truth. It's still truth. It just isn't the whole story.

From the new york times article:

http://mobile.nytimes.com/blogs/bits/2014/11/13/reddit-chief...

"Mr. Wong also recently had a public argument with a former employee of the site in which he laid out the terms of his former employee’s termination in excruciating detail. That incident, according to people close to the company, made some of Reddit’s current employees uncomfortable."

This was not some minor gaffe. This was a very public, major lapse in leadership judgment from the CEO.

No mention of this, though?

https://np.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/2iea97/i_am_a_former_r...

I would not want to work for any company whose CEO takes the low road on personnel issues. That was truly cringeworthy.

Nope.

"Worth noting: Quora has no public API, no backup/export tools, blocks anonymous display of answers, and banned the Wayback Machine entirely."

https://twitter.com/waxpancake/status/453958676529696769

How is this any materially different than the "I always forget my password and I always use the forgot password link"? I guess you don't have to pick a new password each time? But you could just rapidly type in gibberish and achieve nearly the same effect, no real password, login via email.

I don't know why this would be downvoted; I've been appalled to see things from 2012 on Hacker News arbitrarily edited to include the date, as if blog posts from 2012 were some kind of ancient lore of yesteryear.. whereas this article is from 2005 and doesn't include the date at all!

This is in reference to Twitter comments from 2 years ago jokingly suggesting that based on the chilly reception from Gruber to any kind of reduction in ambiguity in Markdown's so-called spec... the name "YankeesSuck" could be used instead.

It isn't something new, it is a strongly specified, highly compatible implementation of Markdown. As seen in "common" use on large websites. And any implementation that passes the current spec tests can also brand itself with CommonMark or "Markdown compatible".

This (discussion area) is the hardest bit to change, the rest of the domain is shut down. Will happen soon.

This is unbelievably accurate. Not even joking. And the last response I got was indeed, more or less, blasphemy!

I'm fine with this one being the lead article.

p.s. my blog is awesome

They will if the standard is supported! Also:

http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/250157/could-stack-o...

Yeah I didn't notice that, let me fix!

Also: PRs welcome!

http://talk.standardmarkdown.com/t/improvements-fixes-to-the...

Good idea!

See: http://talk.standardmarkdown.com/t/create-a-page-or-subdomai...

Ben is listed on the site and works at Stack Exchange right now.

definitely raise that on http://talk.standardmarkdown.com

We did -- no response to the current spec after a week of waiting for a reply.

A much earlier lengthy email response from Gruber around 11/2012 evaluated each of the changes Stack Overflow and GitHub made to Markdown one by one (there were some he agreed with) and essentially said "ambiguity is a feature" at the end.

We disagree about that.

The Yoga Pro, which I otherwise liked, was kind of unusable in practice as a tablet just due to weight and size. 13.3" was too big, too heavy.

I worry that a 12" Surface (up from 10.6") might have the same problems. They'll need to really reduce the bezels and keep the weight way down.

Sure -- you're right that the SE engine is definitely only good at specific things (namely, fact/data/science based questions), but it is arguably the best in the world at those particular things.

What is the Quora engine the best in the world at?

I'd look at growth, too. Even the less popular SE sites grow at very respectable rates. How much is Quora growing?

I was mostly speaking about myself there, but yes, I believe it is true of most men. Tell them they can't have something, and they will suddenly want it more than they've ever wanted anything in their entire lives.

Also, didn't this just happen at GitHub?

You should already be your own biggest detractor, all day, erry day. If you aren't, you're in for a rude awakening.

Also, some people prefer to avoid conflict, and this approach maximizes conflict avoidance. Not saying you should seek out conflict, but you can err on the side of going too far out of your way to avoid it as well.

Why do I say this? Oh, no reason.. I just like typing things in boxes on the Internet!

Isn't that the whole point of this approach? The hard thing about hard things is deciding what they are.

Shockingly bad advice, eh?

http://daslee.me/productivity-by-ron-conway

"I finally settled on a system. I asked Ron [Conway] what he does. It’s pretty simple. In the morning, he sets three things to do for the day. If he does all three, then it’s a good day. If he doesn’t, then it’s a bad day."

Yahoo may be bad, but Outlook/Hotmail are without a doubt worse. Exhibit A:

http://serverfault.com/questions/434703/why-does-hotmail-sti...

Doing plugins right is hard.

My philosophy is also that 90% of what you would want to do with plugins should be built in, anyways.

sort of, http://www.discourse.org/buy has the official 3 early beta partners. Those are solid and mature since they've almost been around a year now!

In the last 3 months we went from 500 Discourse forums to 1500+. (We screen out the obvious test installs with IPs for names, etc.) We're about to take the brakes off as we get to V1.0, I have been reticient to really encourage people to launch new Discourse sites while we are in beta. But it's speeding up as we get closer. Open source FTW!

We don't have a public directory of all Discourse forums -- we do internally, since everyone pings us for versioning, but I have been hesitant about exposing it until we're clear the community is OK with a public directory.

I don't think that particular genie can be put back in the bottle.

We really want Discourse (http://www.discourse.org) to get to a place where we have extremely robust 100% open source mailing list support -- we now have reply via email, notify via email, and community contributed submit topics via email. Working on attachments via email this week.

It's interesting -- unlike forums, people really enjoy mailing lists. I don't think I've ever met anyone, ever, who said they liked forums. But mailing lists seem to inspire people.

I want to see a long term hybrid model where you can interact nearly completely via email, or a good, modern web UI that YOUR org owns (not google groups or yahoo groups). This should be supported.

This is a nonsensical comparison. If you were truly "angel investing" in your employees, you would be there at birth handing out shares. Or maybe "series A" would be recruiting them at their high school graduation.