dewitt

See http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=bro.

"Obnoxious partying males who are often seen at college parties."

"An alpha male idiot. This is the derogatory sense of the word (common usage in the western US): white, 16-25 years old, inarticulate, belligerent, talks about nothing but chicks and beer"

"A usually white young male, found commonly in places like san bernardino county in california, as well as orange county."

"Deeply racist, yet vulture-ize black culture with attempts to be "down", while living as far from any ghetto as humanly possible."

It goes on like that for 36 pages.

I suppose "brogrammers" might be a target audience, but the concept of the tool itself is pretty good for just about anyone. Shame about the name.

Twitter wraps every link in a redirect.

But I do know it makes me sad whenever I hear that we have any attrition, regretted or otherwise. And I know as an eng manager I try to put myself out there for /any/ engineer who wants a hand, or even just a sympathetic ear. Some cases are just unfixable, but I like to believe we still can repair a good number of them.

I hope things worked out better for you wherever you landed next.

For most engineers most of the time, the job isn't politics or performance reviews. It's writing interesting software with talented teammates.

(Counterexamples of course exist, and a handful of vocal ones certainly like to chime in on threads like this. But if it weren't still mostly good for engineers at Google, Google wouldn't still employ the great engineers it does. But it does have great engineers to this day, so something is still going mostly right.)

And while I don't know how every other company writes their developer Terms of Services, I do know that in Google's case we measure each word carefully and try hard to strike the right balance between offering as much as feasibly possible, while trying to create something long-term sustainable (so even if the usage grows far beyond our initial goals, we're still in a position to keep them available). We're hardly perfect at it yet, but we're certainly getting a lot better over time.

Also worth noting, often times these terms are designed to honor upstream data contracts, so if for no other reason, it's worth trying to respect them because it's the right thing to do for the other relatively small parties, too.

And don't get me wrong—I love APIs, I build them for a living. And I know how much users love them. Unfortunately, not all companies love providing them, or have the economics of doing so fully worked out.

Otherwise isn't it just stealing?

(Fully expecting this to be a controversial comment, but I'm curious what the prevailing sentiments on scraping without permission are these days. Good, because all content should be free, especially crowd-sourced content? Or bad, because the contributors didn't agree to such third-party usage, and it could limit Rap Genius' ability to build a business?)

Here are Brett's projects: http://www.onebigfluke.com/

Maybe you've heard of some of them? PubSubHubbub, Google App Engine, Camlistore, Google Consumer Surveys.

http://googlecommerce.blogspot.com/2013/03/calling-all-sf-ba...

I'm a fan. We use it several times a week.

The value of a bitcoin will have to become less volatile before that day comes. Compare:

http://blockchain.info/charts/market-price

With:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:U.S._Dollar_Index.png

Yes, the value of the dollar also fluctuates, but over 30 years it has ranged only around 30%. Whereas bitcoin has ranged 4000% in a single year. Not sure any pub would want to accept that volatility, nor would any patron.

I suspect, and this will be easy enough to prove one way or the other after a few years so feel free to call me on it, that we'll see a disproportionate number of successful exits come from /outside/ the valley.

My gut tells me that high-cost of living and inter-company cannibalization are going to make it difficult for companies to sustain long-term growth in the Bay Area (once the data-skewing, one-off, billion-dollar Instagram-esque deals are factored out over time).

Whereas talent will tend to stick to the one or two success stories in less saturated geographies, adding a natural doubling down effect when something is working out well. Sort of a healthy survivorship bias, in a good way.

Edit: And while two anecdotes are still hardly data, I just now noticed that Indianapolis, Indiana based ExactTarget sold today for $2.5B.

I realize you worked there for a few months a few years ago, but I think someone might have been pulling your leg if they told you that phrase. (But you're right, like most meetings at Google, calibration meetings do happen in rooms. They're just normal conference rooms, though. Nothing special.)

For everyone else: calibration is a process where other managers at Google cross-check the performance scores given to employees across different teams and parts of the company. We do this so that an individual manager can't introduce undue bias or play favorites, and so an engineer at a given level in one part of the company is more or less the equal of an engineer at the same level in another part.

Calibration is one part of the system I think works really well, much better than any other place I've worked. In fact, I think more companies might want to emulate it.

Needless to say, maybe we should have held out a bit longer. The late 90's were a strange time indeed.

Oracle has used exactly this business model to great success, and obscene profit, for over 30 years.

OnTrac will sink Amazon Prime.

This was 100% true of me as well for a decade or more. But getting into the Google Shopping Express beta changed everything. Same day delivery (i.e., even faster than Prime), competitive prices, up-to-the-minute order and delivery tracking, and sharply dressed and exceptionally polite and courteous couriers, means that for a large portion of "just use Amazon" products I'm now going with Google instead. See http://google.com/shopping/express/about/.

Selection and availability are of course the caveats of the early Google tests (limited to just San Francisco and parts of the Bay Area for now), and I was skeptical at first, but boy is this a game changer if we can pull it off. I've averaged almost an order a day since we started.

Granted, Amazon's use of OnTrac in San Francisco for Prime is also a factor. I may not renew my Prime membership for the first time since it launched as a result of OnTrac's poor service here.

(Ob. disclosure: I've worked at both companies.)

Imagine you follow @timoreilly for his technical and political insights, only to see farmville spam in 3 out of 4 of his posts. That would get very old, very quickly.

Twitter is awesome partly because of the lack of app-specific streams, but it necessarily limits the types of things you can do on the platform. Now, they may reverse course on that direction as a consequence of pushing Cards so hard, but they're not there yet, and arguably will steadfastly continue to avoid going there.

See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/3.0/

I say "most", because you also included the "so long as you do not charge anything for it" phrase in your license. Personally I'm not convinced that matters much in practice, as who is going to be able to charge for something you are giving away for free (and if they do, it'll be on a small scale, and do you really care?), and it's notoriously difficult to define things like commercial use, but if you feel strongly there's always the Non-Commercial variant: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/

Thanks!

Reference: http://learnvimscriptthehardway.stevelosh.com/license.html

But to my surprise, Shaw not only isn't proprietary about the brand, it looks like he is going out of his way to help other people appropriate it:

  https://gitorious.org/learn-x-the-hard-way

"This is a skeleton LaTeX project that makes it easier to start working on a “Learn X The Hard Way” book. You simply clone this repository, change a few base files, and then you can start writing. It will also come with a small “meta book” that gives you advice for writing and publishing your book."

Very cool. While it seems that Steve Losh didn't use the actual templates above (he picked markdown instead of rst), it's neat that the overall style itself is designed to be reusable.

Best of luck with the new book!

As someone living in the US, I can only imagine the frustration people must feel not having access to content in their home countries. It would drive me nuts as well.

But as someone working at a company who also tries very, very hard to make services available to people around the world (the goal is 100% coverage) I also know how hard/impossible it is to negotiate with the rights holders in every nation simultaneously.

So services like Rdio or Vdio need to make a very tough choice: delay their launch, perhaps for years, perhaps forever, to negotiate the rights in all ~200 countries and territories in the world, or launch in the biggest markets first, and hope and try to iterate from there.

I don't know if there even is a right answer. But I do know for sure that it's not Rdio/Vdio's choice not to launch globally. They want it the other way, too.

(As an aside, the phrase "geo-tarded" doesn't sit well with me. Perhaps use "geo-challenged", which says the same thing without the additional connotations.)

For example: http://rosettacode.org/wiki/Hello_World

Plus, I enjoyed learning the word "chrestomathy", which "from the Greek words khrestos, useful, and mathein, to know, is a collection of choice literary passages, used especially as an aid in learning a subject."

There appears to be an uptick of hyper-agressive technical posts over the past several years. I'm not sure where it started, but I'm hoping it burns itself out soon.

(If you're the author, I apologize for calling you out on this. Nothing personal at all, I just wanted to make the general point about tone.)