Do you spend all day scheming ways to exploit people? Fuck no, get over it already.
This is true, but a bit misleading. As an engineer at Zynga, you spend your time developing to spec, not scheming. The game designers are the ones that actually spend all day scheming ways to exploit people.
I think the stigma mostly comes from the fact that so many of Zynga's users hate their products. It's not really because of the engineering talent there, it's just how the organization works, but still, it's a stigma that makes sense.
All things being equal, there is a 2/3 chance that that next Google won't be happening in the US.
In this case, all things are not equal. Being located in the US and specifically in Silicon Valley makes a lot of venture-backed startup life easier, whether you need cofounders, investors, advisors, or employees. It's not a coincidence that Google, Apple, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Zynga, and Yahoo are all in the same area.
Instead of saying "no" to their idea, try to say "yes" to something else. Ask yourself, what could they do that would prove it's a good idea? For example, maybe they could line up a customer who would pay for it, or an investors would would pay to have it developed. Then you can suggest they take this additional action.
we're currently getting about 30M hits a month on our API
If you're getting a million API requests a day, you can probably handle that load with a single machine. Indeed, it looks like they are using just one load balancer machine, one app server, and one db server. I'm not sure why the load balancer is even necessary. It's cool to hear this story, readers should just keep in mind that this is not really a "web scale" deployment.
Sometimes pivoting is easy, because you've been struggling with a crappy product, everyone knows you need to change something, and you're getting an incredible response for a landing page you threw up on a whim over the weekend. So pivot - easy call.
Sometimes pivoting is hard, because you're making some money, employees are happy, but you're convinced that in six months your market segment won't exist any more.
If you're pushing changes to production many times a day, you can use realtime metrics to notice if anything goes awry, and know when you should roll back. It won't give you the same nuances as an A/B test over a month, but it's a great way to do a quick double check to keep things moving quickly while avoiding disaster.
“What needs to be obvious?” is a better question to ask than “What’s high priority?”
I don't think one is better than the other. They are both critical and serve a different purpose.
"What needs to be obvious?" is a design question. It's important, but it doesn't tell you what you should be doing each day.
"What's high priority?" is a project management question. Once your product already exists, and you have a zillion features that should be possible but don't need to be easy, you then have to prioritize all of them to figure out what gets done.
Another area where fuzzy string search is really useful is computational biology. You often have a particular DNA or RNA sequence and you want to figure out what it is. However, the version on file can be different by a few mutations. For this sort of search where the database can be quite large, there are specialized algorithms like BLAST that index by n-grams.
Just thought I'd mention it because if you find it interesting, computational biology is a real growth area right now - the cost of sequencing genomes has been dropping faster than Moore's law, and it's quite possible that within our lifetimes we will be using this sort of technology to genetically engineer people.
I feel like what makes a "dream job" is so often the people you're working with, rather than your job title or the product. I'd rather be working with smart people who respected my work on a normal piece of software, than working on, say, a fun video game where my boss was a slave-driver.
It's great to hear that Django is moving to GitHub. It seems like the Python community has been slow to adopt git, perhaps because Bazaar and Mercurial are written in Python, and perhaps because GitHub uses Ruby. That said, it seems like git is emerging as the winner, and IMHO GitHub is far superior to anything available outside of git, so I'm glad they're making the move.
Saying their "entire business model is under fire" seems too extreme. From the article:
The EC is planning to ban such activity unless users themselves specifically agree to it.
Okay, so, at worst Facebook just has to make users specifically agree to this before they can continue using Facebook. I'm sure some people wouldn't agree, but it's not a big enough deal that Facebook would change their business model.
Keep in mind that if any subtype of the population is growing exponentially, then the whole population will also grow exponentially in the asymptote. I'd be hesitant to disagree with Hawking on this.
One feature of Emacs that I wish IDEs would or could adopt is macros. It really enables a larger set of refactorings when you can repeat any text transformation. You really need non-popup find-this-string, though.
Node was created to provide an event-based web server programming model
This is not true, and it's probably why the author seems confused. Node was not primarily designed to be a web server, nor is it particularly good at that. It is much better as a server that keeps sockets open, like for a chat application.
Space exploration is like selling off your stocks during a tech bubble: it's obvious it needs to happen sometime, but it's really hard to figure out when the right time is. Unfortunately, that means for-profit organizations underinvest. This is one of those cases where it really does make sense for government to encourage the sector with investment, although it seems like X-prize-type systems might work better than NASA-type systems.
This is really neat. Although, one thing that makes it easier to map this program from Python to Clojure is that the original program was written in a pretty functional style. It would be interesting to see if a more imperative sample program, or one using more object-oriented features, would map similarly.
At my company, we're hiring mobile developers. We have received over 100 resumes. 2 of them were from women. I wish we could hire a more diverse group, but it's pretty obvious that changing our selection process isn't enough.
I love Instapaper, but it's especially interesting that Marco has been able to compete against larger groups like Readability and Apple's Reading List. I'm afraid it might be inevitable that he gets swamped by a constant stream of competitive features, unless Instapaper expands beyond 1 employee.
Really interesting. A couple of physics things I did not know that Neil mentions:
1) The fact that an electron has no known size -- it's smaller than the smallest measurement we have ever made of anything.
2) That Quarks come only in pairs: If you try to separate two of them, the energy you sink into the system to accomplish this feat is exactly the energy to spontaneously create two more quarks - one to partner with each of those you pulled apart.
It seems like Scala has the potential to be the next language widely used in large organizations. The JVM means you can fall back to Java if you really need to, and overall development with Scala is more developer-friendly. It'll be exciting if it happens because it could really validate the build-on-the-JVM strategy for new language designs.
There's no big secret why Bill Nguyen can raise money. Once you have sold one company for $850 mil, you aren't going to have trouble raising money in the future.
As opposed to Goldman Sachs, which would never expose investors to swindles? Give me a break. The powers that be oppose crowdfunding because the financial industry jealously defends their legal barriers to competition, not because they're looking out for the common man.
It seems inevitable that all public information about people will become organized, and you just won't be able to keep secrets like this any more. Better than it be available to everyone than only to sneaky governmental agencies.
I just wish you could speed up the animation for switching between workspaces. Being used to Gnome some of the whizzier OS X animations just seem like a waste of time.
This is like complaining "Why is so much spam email irrelevant to me?" If someone cold-calls you their business model is to churn through many people who are annoyed before they find one who hires them. The great recruiters aren't going to cold-call you. So there's a selection bias.