icey

Have you thought about picking up any hobbies? Six months would give you plenty of time to learn a hobby and really get into it; you have enough time to try a few. It might be nice to think back on your sabbatical while doing your new hobby in the future.

This is great advice, I want to add to this:

> This person should personally gain something by your product. i.e. spend less time doing something they hate, look good to their boss. Linkedin can be super helpful for this.

to include "This person should be someone who might be the _purchaser_ of your product" (e.g. the person who can buy it, since they're the person you need to convince)

The reasoning behind the naming is outlined here: http://www.pipeline.com/~hbaker1/CheneyMTA.html. It's a fun read and once you see the lyric it's based on, it makes a lot more sense.

Perhaps maximized cognitive potential isn't compatible with most corporate jobs.

Mostly it's about letting folks know we're paying attention. I'm not in a community function at all (I'm a developer turned salesperson -- I just happen to be a long-time HN user and thought I'd mention that this stuff isn't falling on deaf ears). A challenge is that we get thousands of feature requests all over the board; and no matter what we do, we'll miss something that people want. That doesn't mean it's not coming, it may just mean that it's not ready (although to be fair, we are pretty unlikely to ever build everything people want). It's useful to us to see this feedback (truly), and I just wanted to mention that we see it. A quick glance at Pulse for the main GitHub repository shows that there have been over 200 Pull Requests merged (and shipped) and over 50 issues closed just in the past 7 days -- these are things that somebody somewhere wanted, even if it's not everything that's on one specific person's list. That's just in one repository -- there are similarly active repos with a similar number of ships in the past week.

Can we be better? Absolutely, yes. This is the most "care hard" company I've ever worked at, and we really want to do things to the best of our abilities. I know this doesn't help you if there's something you've asked for, or something you legitimately _need_ and don't have yet; what I hope will help is knowing that these requests aren't being ignored.

Heya, random GitHubber here -- I can't provide any information about things that are in-progress, but we see these threads and are paying attention to them. The "Dear GitHub" letter, etc all get sent around here, show up in chat rooms, and get talked about quite a lot internally. We value feedback from all our users -- GitHub.com users, Open Source maintainers, and our Enterprise users. There's a lot for us to do to make GitHub better for everybody, and everyone's feedback is valuable. While it's true that we've put a lot of effort into getting GitHub Enterprise into the shape we wanted it, it's important to note that a lot of enterprises use GitHub because of the millions of people on GitHub.com -- they see how powerful open-source style development is and want to emulate it internally. It would be utterly disastrous for us to ignore the feedback of all the users who got us to where we are today.

I started reading the sequel this weekend, based on your recommendation. So far it's been excellent. Thank you for the suggestion!

I just started reading Avogadro Corp (http://www.amazon.com/Avogadro-Corp-Singularity-Closer-Appea...) this weekend, and this reminds me quite a lot of the emergent AI that figures heavily in the story (ELOPe). A quick synopsis: developers build a system to "improve" responses from emails. The system at some point is given the ability to send emails on its own, and a poorly issued directive. It's been an engaging read so far, and fairly hilarious since the corporation in the book is very obviously based on Google.

Something that smells bad to me: Homejoy was facing multiple lawsuits at the time they shut down (http://www.forbes.com/sites/ellenhuet/2015/07/17/cleaning-st...). Is this some kind of end-run around that?

> Odds are that the founders weren't behind this move.

Are you insinuating that someone other than Aaron Cheung sent the email from the top of the post? That seems... strange.

I keep a copy of this on my desk. When people start smelling like it's about to leak out in the middle of conversation, I'll casually pick it up and flip through the pages. It seems to work ;)

My understanding from reading past posts is that they think this could be a great way to discover people who would be interested in roles at companies they hadn't previously considered. Shotgunning everyone who plays as leads isn't a great model as it lowers perceived quality of the candidates they send on ("I got a lead for this amazing developer, but she didn't want to change jobs at all, wtf?!").

Think of it as a game with "new job" as a piece of available loot. Play it because it seems fun (and you still might learn something that you can use later).

Poker math is great for quick estimation of whether an investment (time, money, or otherwise) is worthwhile. Poker is all about risk vs. reward, and puts you into the mindset of approaching risk statistically instead of using an all-or-nothing approach. Considering investments in that way allows you to get a better sense of whether or not something is worth your time, even if there's a non-zero chance of failure (or sometimes a near 100% chance of failure for an appropriately large payoff).

Yes, absolutely!

Pinboard is one of those pieces of software that has "just worked" since I first signed on. It's been a surprisingly useful part of my daily life, and the lack of bullshit when using it has been awesome. Also: Maciej is an incredible writer. If you haven't read his blog (http://idlewords.com/) or his Twitter account (https://twitter.com/baconmeteor) you really should.

No, definitely not! Please apply.

We don't have an internship program in place at the moment.

GitHub is hiring across all teams, both in SF and remote: https://github.com/about/jobs.

We especially need sales engineers, which is a great role for any developer or ops person looking to make a transition to sales. Especially important skills:

  * Excellent written and verbal communication skills
  * Customer facing experience as this is a pre-sales role
  * Familiarity with Git and GitHub
  * Ability to talk with both technical and non-technical employees 
    both internal to GitHub and at customer sites

You can see the sales engineering job post here: https://jobs.github.com/positions/2f1183c2-482d-11e4-9945-68...

One last thing that I'd like to point out for all of our roles (it's at the bottom of the job post too, but I think it's important): GitHub is made up of people with many different backgrounds and lifestyles, and we like it that way. We invite applications from people of all stripes. We don't discriminate against employees or applicants based on gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, race, religion, age, national origin, citizenship, pregnancy status, veteran status, or any other differences that people imagine to discriminate against one another.

Please apply if you think this might be a good fit for you. You can't waste our time!

Awesome, this helped quite a lot. Thank you!

It would be great to see a refactor of some code using transducers to get a better sense of what they're useful for. From an abstraction standpoint, I can see the attraction; but I am having a tough time imagining how it would improve code in practice.

That's a great idea; just posted it over there and added it to the sidebar.

Perhaps he meant teraflops, and there was a transcription error? Although I imagine prediction would have to be petaflops to be accurate.

I was a developer for 17 years and switched into enterprise sales a couple of years ago (with a short stint as a technical account manager in between). The upside of the transition is that sales is still a job for problem-solvers, although you'll be much less hands on. The downside is that there are expectations for performance that come along with the upsides of being paid based on that performance. I still hack on stuff in my spare time, but that time seems much less abundant now (certainly less time to surf HN, for example ;)).

If this is something you're interested in, many organizations are in need of sales engineers (pre-sales technical folks) who have real experience from the trenches. If you are comfortable talking with technical and non-technical people alike, sales engineering is probably the best place to start. The challenge with getting into a purely sales role is that many places expect a level of experience before hiring people. Negotiations and proposal building can be surprisingly complex, and there aren't many organizations interested in training-up sales people. Sales engineering would serve the purpose of giving you exposure to the pre-negotiation piece of the sales process, as well as introducing you to a lot of people with deep experience in the negotiation / closing process.

I'd be happy to chat with you offline about my experiences as well -- my email is in my profile.

If you're talking about Git-LFS, it's open source: https://github.com/github/git-lfs

The API spec is available here: https://github.com/github/git-lfs/blob/master/docs/api.md

There's a reference implementation here: https://github.com/github/lfs-test-server

The good news is they seem to be accepting Pull Requests for updates to their documentation (along with everything else): https://github.com/Azure/azure-storage-node/pulls?q=is%3Apr+...

I know that doesn't help you when you need to consume the docs, but at the very least they're allowing the community to help out (finally).

I don't think it would be shocking to see it open sourced. Microsoft has been making a lot of changes on this front: http://microsoft.github.io/.

If anyone wants to get into this game, I'll sell you edible-insects.com and https://twitter.com/edibleinsects :)

It's not especially programming or design related; but I was recently turned on to EconTalk (http://www.econtalk.org/) and it's been very enjoyable. Especially good talks were:

* Nick Bostrom on Superintelligence: http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2014/12/nick_bostrom_on.htm...

* Piketty on Inequality and Capital in the 21st Century: http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2014/09/thomas_piketty.html

Please do! Shoot me an email at pauln@github.com; the feedback would be very appreciated.

We've done an enormous amount of work on GitHub Enterprise over the past year. Click on any of the release headings for the 2.x series at https://enterprise.github.com/releases and you'll see the pace at which we've been shipping features enterprises have been asking for. If it's been a little while since you checked it out I'd recommend looking at it again :)