jwecker

absolutely. For more minor tasks the point is more subtle- it forces you to make sure you're delegating because it is the best thing for the organization, and not because you simply don't feel like doing it and happen to be in a position to delegate.

Interestingly, even if you (as the delegator) aren't aware of the difference, the people you are delegating to are most likely picking up on it, and it will have an enormous impact on their motivation and trust.

There is a cumulative effect here. If someone who is consistent on that first point were to call you up and ask you to fly to a meeting on his/her behalf on a Saturday evening, you'll (emotionally, at least) have no problem doing it. If, on the other hand, someone who is _not_ consistent on this point asks the same thing (whether or not you've consciously realized it) you will likely have some degree of resistance or outright resentment.

You have a big potential investor coming over tomorrow and the office is a wreck. A poor leader would delegate the cleanup simply because he/she can, and people will pick up the psychological cues. A good leader will ask himself if he's willing to do it but can better the organization more if he does something else, and only if there is a positive answer will he delegate the job. And again, people will pick up the psychological cues.

My rules of thumb:

* Don't ask anyone to do something you're not willing to do yourself (willing doesn't mean that it's smart for you to be the one doing it)

* Don't ever delegate by abdicating responsibility

* If there isn't any follow-up, it wasn't really delegated.

* Allow properly aligned incentives to do a lot of the "delegating" for you.

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He grossly overstates the stability of subscriptions and their predictability. They _can_ be more stable than advertising revenue when faced with some kinds of disruptive factors... anyway, written from the grass-is-greener-on-the-other-side-of-the-fence perspective of someone who hasn't been there.

I remember in Manila (Philippines) there was a light at an intersection that turned red in probably half the time any other light did. What's more, crossing the intersection required crossing 6+ lanes of traffic, so frequently you could enter the intersection with a green light but still end up traversing it mostly when the light was red. There was a gaggle of 10 or so cops standing at the other side at all times, issuing tickets. If you gave them a disapproving look though sometimes they'd just wave you through anyway, looking a little embarrassed at their scheme.

I've absolutely loved patching and working on modules for nginx source code. Partially I suspect because it's so homogeneous. It's nice and modular and succinct - the optimizations don't obfuscate the code. As others have pointed out, responding to http requests is not rocket science, and digging into nginx reminds you that responding to a simple problem simply tends to yield pretty good reliability and performance.

Spot on. I would like to specifically emphasize bokonist's "b)" - I only made real progress with design when I started consciously seeking out design that looked amazing- even taking photographs occasionally of billboards etc., and then trying to recreate it. Otherwise you're doing the programming equivalent of reading about languages without even bothering to type out examples- let alone composing your own.

Justin TV http://www.justin.tv/jobs Please apply (:

Three mathematicians were out bow-hunting. Laying low they spotted a buck. The first took aim and let loose but the arrow silently zipped by 10 feet to the right of the dear. The second took aim but the arrow missed- 10 feet to the left of the dear. At which point the third, a statistician, jumped up and yelled- "We got it!"

I was looking forward to a humorous example of even a single use case being literally broken, since I don't know how to literally break a use case. Alas, it's just a list of use cases the iPad doesn't meet.

I wonder what they have against real dark brown and real light blue? Ah, I see a second shade of blue they discontinued. Probably needed the names for some other shades...

For some informed data on the topic instead, try http://www.nytimes.com/2002/04/04/us/few-risks-seen-to-the-c...

or, more recently: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/26/garden/26cousins.html

"Dr. Motulsky said researchers did not know why marriage between cousins was viewed with such distaste in the United States. He said some of the revulsion might have stemmed from the eugenics movement, which intended to improve the human race by deciding who should be allowed to breed. The movement flourished in this country early in the 20th century."

Anti-cousin-marriage is a very recent and very American thing, and stems from the same movement that gave us nazi racism.

I learned from this that Cuba is creating a secret army of rubyless programmers that it will at some point unleash upon the world.

"The intrusion of politics into government ..." Yeah, I know they're not exactly the same thing, but that statement still made me laugh.

I can only assume that the 12 points you currently have are from people who agree with you. If so, that's very ironic.

Ask HN: Math major who doesn't want to write equations. Am I in the wrong major?

Keep in mind as you brainstorm that there are additional API's coming out, including a pay-per-view API, subscriptions, etc. Also integrated ad networks if desired. Monetization shouldn't be a big problem moving forward. I'm sure there are some brilliant ideas waiting to be discovered involving PPV...

I think you slightly underestimate JTV's performance, as well as the level to which it can be customized...

EDIT: concede the point to DarkShikari, though I still think you could make very viable companies based on those ideas and JTV technology.

9 years ago there was a small writeup about me in the New Yorker- http://www.petermaass.com/articles/the_supercool_top-secret_... - small as in it was in the "talk of the town" section, which tends to cover trivial things in a column or so.

That one write-up of the incident changed my perception of the media profoundly. I had been interviewed probably a dozen times before the interview with Peter Maass, and had even appeared on TV (some Canadian show I don't remember)- and had been mentioned in 60-minutes.

Most of the interviews were probably 5-10 minutes long and resulted in multi-page articles. The interview with Peter took over two hours and resulted in the 7 paragraphs that you can't even find leafing through the issue because it's so small (not a complaint, btw- I was just super pleased to be in the New Yorker at all).

More importantly, though, in addition to the two hour interview, I received a call from a no-nonsense "fact-checker" the day after. She had a pre-compiled list of every (_every_) fact Peter was going to mention in his article. It went something like this:

"You say you had [x] downloads of the song in [x] days. Do you have logs that can prove this to some degree?"

"You say you are enrolled at the University of Utah but they cannot get us proof before we go to print- do you have proof?" (I didn't, it was nixed).

"You say you were ranked #1 in folk-songs at mp3.com- they have chosen not to comment and say they have no idea. Do you have proof?" (thankfully I had taken a screenshot that mp3.com verified as accurate).

This went on for _3 hours_ and several emails and physical mailings.

Of all the other blogs, tv shows, magazines, newspapers, etc. that talked to me- (btw, I'm embarrassed to say I hadn't really heard of blogs until then)- guess how many did _any_ sort of fact checking? None.

The thought occurred to me then that if they went through that much trouble for something more or less in the gossip section, I could probably trust their more meaty articles. More importantly it showed me that there are definitely worlds of difference between how media vets what they report.

Edit: Now I just read the magazine for the cartoons though because of pressures on my time (:

I've used this library a few times for similar (not as good and not good enough to show off) fun- it works beautifully: http://sexpr.sourceforge.net

Inaccurate whois records are grounds for cancellation of a domain name. If you feel that the contact information is outdated or inaccurate, bring it up with ICANN. If the squatter is being lazy it may free up the domain.

overhead walks on two legs (:

Funny you should use that example. I remember mentioning to someone years ago that biologists had discovered that certain trees send chemical signals to each other through the soil- especially when they're traumatized.

He scoffed and laughed and said "Can you believe the stupid stuff people research? All this stuff with absolutely no application..."

I was frankly a little stunned. I was thinking that it could affect crop growth, depending on how you harvest the last crop, how if there was a trauma mechanism there might be a reverse mechanism that could cause revolutions in biological growth, etc. etc. etc. I couldn't believe he didn't see the potential I saw.

Which brings me to my point: saying "...no feasible way for them to monetize it" is, in my opinion, a symptom of lack of imagination. While it's not all monetize-able, I believe with the author that 48B of research represents a goldmine of ideas for someone with the proper eye for opportunity and business acumen.

This is the biggest problem I have with gmail, and one of the principle reasons why I don't feel I'll be using it "permanently." My search queries very rarely find the emails that I'm looking for.

It's not every day you get a genuine "what color to paint the bike-shed" discussion :)

I don't think I've ever misspelled ls as sl (though I've done ls- alf and derivations plenty of times). Now that I've installed this, though, I intend to do it often.

I think people on this board especially understand that something as simple as an email account can directly affect our means of making a living and can have very serious consequences, therefore we understand that a blanket deactivation could be the equivalent of "to help me fix my mistake, you must lose your job."

To non-geeks loosing an email account isn't as big of a deal, so it's easy to see why a judge would not realize the significance.

"Hi, you received an email from us yesterday with confidential information. Please contact us immediately and destroy the file. It's the email with the subject 'Re: Do we have a way to back up our data?'"

Appeal. (In theory).

He mentioned that llvm-py documentation was lacking... I was going through it, seems pretty darn good to me (relatively). http://mdevan.nfshost.com/llvm-py/userguide.html

Understood. There just seem to be a lot of complaints that the system he used for benchmarking didn't have epoll and that Tornado was slow because of select. I agree. But Erlang on that machine obviously didn't use epoll either.