mcgwiz

Thoughtful comment, but I want to point out that your basis is misleading. His essential point goes beyond eschewing formula, to specifically recommending people use a spoken voice style.

The rationale that I infer is that when people sit down to "write", they enter "writing mode". Writing mode is laden with dogmatic baggage. But the ultimate goal is to communicate, not perform ritual. And since people communicate successfully all the time through speech, it makes sense to suggest that when people write, they don't enter writing mode. Instead, enter "speaking mode" and simply transcribe their speech.

And how is the author instituting this knowledge culturally at work?

The implied equation of sleep and vacation is far too crude. Mixed in the post is the golden nugget that it's necessary not to burn out. Vacation is simply one very specific way to account for that, and probably not even the best. I'd say a much more effective way is to make realistic expectations of team members and yourself, such that no one is being over-worked for indefinite periods. That is much more culturally advantageous. But I do acknowledge the difficulty of instituting that in a startup, what with its bursty nature of stress and periods of slack, so vacation might be more appropriate there then elsewhere.

That's not to say vacation isn't important. It definitely is. Just not as the primary defense against burnout.

Amen.

I would argue that it's not even clear how the market would respond to this, and yet the pro-neutrality camp paint a picture of corporate apocalypse. This seems reasonable to me:

Neutrality rules are repealed. Some ISPs begin discriminating against certain publishers that do not pay up, but can use the payments to subsidize reductions in cost of consumer access. The "multitudes" of neutrality proponents begin demanding undiscriminated connections, calling for boycotts, switching to providers that offer such connections. Neutrality activists develop tools to compare and publicize connection rates to different publishers through different ISPs. Small-time providers form associations to raise awareness of the issue as well. Ethical marketing comes into play as some ISPs and some big publishers reject connection rate differentiation. Some ISPs that also own publishing properties are caught or implied to be preferring their own content over competitors, drawing political attention. In some areas, net neutrality laws (not just "rules") are passed, which is a draw for startups. Meanwhile, many who had no home connectivity in the past are now able to afford the "subsidized/sponsored" service level.

What irks me about the middle-class idealogues raising a fuss about this now is that they arbitrarily draw the line of equality around big corporations, with little attention given to the fact that service is tiered at all. If it doesn't make sense for small publishers to be penalized for not ponying up, it should make even less sense for certain individuals in society to be penalized for not being able to afford anything more than dial-up or basic DSL. Going further, it should be more appalling that the most financially under-resourced can't even afford the most basic service level, and live without any internet participation. Instead, they prefer corporations to carry the costs of keeping the level field artificially level, while doing nothing to help those below them have the same level of access they do.

The basic notion of empowering corporate and political entities to judge for a people what information is and is not "acceptable" is scary to me, and I would imagine, to most Americans. (I expand on this here: http://blocvox.com/americans/93Mz6FfGIku-CcH8JHndIg )

To my knowledge, the word "acceptable" is never used in any pertinent legal code, but it is used by MPs and other officials, and therefore represents the cultural understanding of the law. So one must then ask, what is culturally made of people who are interested in material that is not "acceptable"?

I wonder if my repulsion to this is a cultural thing, Americans having more governmental skepticism and having a tradition of individualism, versus Britons having more faith in (to put it nicely) the potential of government to foster order and maintain cultural heritage.

Wow, haven't seen that. Agree it appears unprofessional and frat-ish. On the other hand, he may have found this colloquial tone is more effective than a professional one given the specific audience they are communicating with (people that publish youth- and music-oriented blogs).

I feel that being able to communicate in a traditionally-professional manner increases overall chance of success. But this is only because it is generally accepted that such a tone can signal trustworthiness. So even more important is the ability to communicate trustworthiness, whatever that may precisely mean, and the exact parameters of this vary by correspondents. If the people you truly value are skeptical of symbols of tradition and establishment, then a good marketing practice would be to adopt an anti-establishment brand.

So while I'm aware of tone, I try to refrain from overreacting to it, and try to give the content/actions a fair shake. All that said, in this particular case of collusive link building, I do find him shady and abusive/disrespectful toward the internet community.

What do find "juvenile" or "offensive" about them? The rap subject matter they cater to?

I've always found them reasonably professional, particularly their evidence-driven handling of the Heroku load distribution debacle.

http://news.rapgenius.com/James-somers-herokus-ugly-secret-l...

They make no mention of asking the unnatural link publishers to take the links down (such links can be found in Google Webmaster Tools), or of using the Disavow Links tool to tell Google they do not want anything to do with those links.

Lessons learned: Better to be safe than sorry. Know your tools. Know your partners.

Overall, I agree with the post.

> The freedom to do whatever one wants, wherever one wants (within moral limits, I hope).

This overreaches. You cannot do "whatever," "wherever". This implies complete control over one's circumstances, which is obviously absurd.

More precisely, money buys increased control over your circumstances and life. This is very valuable and empowering, but it is clearly limited.

Of course it's not exactly the same. But the approach was similar. They each believed that more could be done to bring their creations closer to perfection if they understood the underlying technologies better. Commenter took that to one level, and Carmack took that to the extreme. But both relied on tech abstractions that effectively had a multiple levels of proficiency.

Did I miss something or is 2013 already over?

Also, didn't find any mention of NSA or Snowden. Sadly, I wasn't surprised.

TLDR: Don't worry. We have civil liberties orientation. You can trust us.

The author understands their is a misconception at play, but it's not that the public thinks NSA agents aren't upstanding or law-abiding, it's that NSA agents think their idea idea of patriotism is broad enough. It's telling that he dismissed an examination of patriotism, because that's the root of so much discord over civil liberties and national security.

There are two major currents of patriotism in this country. The first is that we take pride in our accomplishments, and we must defend our borders, protect our treasure and lives, and maintain the status quo. The second is more idealistic, that we take pride in having an open (vulnerable, ever-changing) society, and we must defend our democratic identity, promote participation, protect individual freedom, and be skeptical of concentrations of power. The first is practical, easy to quantify (and therefore appealing to a data-thirsty culture). The second is strategic, asks more from the average citizen, and rests on an understanding of alternative forms of society (what is lost when we prioritize security and order over those "inalienable" rights).

Ideally, the NSA would be staffed by patriots of the second type. They'd embrace 'public service' as having deep reverence for the public (not just their physical safety, but their liberties as well), that appreciates the philosophical underpinning of democracy (including it's necessitation of vulnerability and cultural evolution), and that prides itself in taking on their intelligence goals while ardently building checks and balances. They'd never just ask how they can get the information, but how it can be done in a way that proudly upholds American values. With bureaucracy you'll always have some amount of inefficiency and misalignment with top-level goals, but a pervasive culture can go along way.

Whoa, this comment ruins the page layout. If you can still edit it, can you throw two spaces in front of it? (That'll render it in a fixed-width <code> block.)

I believe I understand what you're saying, and in my gut I feel the same. But I wonder if that is something learned, something relative to the present condition of humanity. Civilization seems to hold itself together by a thread. But I think as long as resources are limited this is necessary, because the engine of evolution pushes individuals to be as efficient as possible with resource consumption and competition. In the struggle to survive, this is tempered only by the personal value of a civil society (e.g. less threat of violent death). So we live in constant tension between satisfying ourselves and making sure just enough is done to keep the whole race from self-destructing.

There are of course many who don't subscribe to these traits (at least not consciously). I believe most of them are subject to cultural belief systems that promote social cohesion and cooperation: the nobility (and intellectualism) of altruism, the teachings of compassion by many religions, the promise of a release from guilt by donating to charity.

But if society were certainly stable, then what is there for one to actualize toward? Perhaps it would be that other engine that propels us: Curiosity. But isn't the pursuit of one's curiosities primarily selfish?

Assuming you find it more moral to "do something for society" with your life, than to lounge around on drugs, what if there were nothing for you to do? What if all social ills and problems were taken care of by technology? Or what if there was definitively no appreciation for what you do? This could take the form of zero demand for your skills, or cultural change in which mainstream society ostracizes those that try to do good for others (perhaps recasting them in a different moral light: "trying to meddle in others' affairs").

I guess you could still go off and live in the woods with those that do not ascribe to a drugged life, and build a separate society. But even that still means the original society is doomed.

These characterizations of a happiness drug contradict the forces of evolution.

If any such a drug were to be developed, it would indeed sap ambition from many people. Even assuming it accounts for all existing relevant genetic variation, it wouldn't prevent genetic mutation. So those born with mutations that make the drug less effective will procreate with relative ease, eventually correcting for the drugs adverse effect on the survival of the species.

Of course if cultural (political?) forces also established that any genetic variation was bad, then we would indeed be in trouble. Why? With no threat of pain, and the absence of pleasure replaced by unlimited pleasure, what goals would exist? What would motivate action? Or given a relativistic perspective, what would just motivate procreation?

Awesome site!

I'm no mathematician, but my gut tells me that advancing mathematics is not the clinical, uninspired, technical process that the "mathematician" stereotype implies. Instead, it seems to be fueled as much by creativity, imagination and mental flexibility as any purely artistic endeavor. Like art, it also requires significant discipline to master its technical underpinnings, is a gamble that pays off in years (if ever), and produces works that have the power to completely alter human understanding.

So it's a bummer it has not developed a rebellious and disruptive image, the way pop art careers have. As a result, the field is not benefited by creative, motivated youth with ambitions of changing the world. One can only hope improvements in math education (more conceptual techniques, higher teacher pay, less corporate influence, etc) can make it more accessible and catalyze an eventual change in its perception.

I hope you educated your users not to forward any of that mail.

Verified/full names are incompatible with profiles/content that are public by default.

I give Diaspora and the author kudos for the effective hatebait title, though I would have preferred "Study the documentation/source of all mission critical components carefully."

Reading through the article, I saw similarities between their issues and ones I've encountered. However, having skeptically studied MongoDB's docs and tested its behavior, I had a very good idea early that MongoDB preferred idempotent, append-only, and eventual-consistent data, with two-phase commit being the nuclear option (and that boxen-wise, the high-memory ones are preferred).

Regarding denormalization storage, invalidation is indeed a tricky issue. A CQRS approach with a durable event queue between the command/domain and an idempotent denormalization system elegantly yields an exceptional scalability:complexity ratio. In the end, I built a performant, flexible app that's been a joy to work on and operate.

I see pain similar to Diaspora's as a result of "move fast, break things" culture taken to the extreme. No planning or basic research of any kind is expected anymore. I know (from experience watching people pick technologies they barely understand and try to IntelliSense their way to delivery) that I'm in the minority, but I've always preferred to read a book cover-to-cover (or traverse a website depth-first) before adopting a technology in earnest, because I know I don't know what I don't know.

The author is not criticizing or championing anything. He's just being descriptive. He attaches to his description a reference to the psychological theory that similar people have an innate need to preserve a degree of individuality. This applies to tribes, romantic partners, and software development teams.

While one may or may not agree with Freud, the article is at least food for thought. Presenting software conflicts in this way asks us to acknowledge our instinctual psychological motives and question our claims of objectivity, technical soundness and pure logic. This kind of in-fighting serves only the individual and not the team.

Personally, I think there is great value in having a plurality of ideas and voices, but in a commercial setting, they must ultimately serve the team. This creates tension because individuals must be able to restrain their impulses.

The root problem is not that Facebook is trying to maximize it's sustainability, or that this guy wants something for nothing, it's simply that for years, Facebook effectively set very clear expectations in the minds of users, and then stopped meeting them.

This, of course, is common with consumer web startups, where the prevailing wisdom is "grow Grow GROW!! ...and worry about monetization later". That's great only if you're gunning for a flip or acquihiring. Good to signal monetization intent, and how that might affect the experience, early. (Best to actually try monetizing early.)

You mischaracterize one of MongoDB's main draws. It's not just indexing, but indexing over a schemaless dataset. Mongo isn't unique in providing this, but combined with other features it is compelling for certain scenarios.

That said, if Postgres matches/exceeds enough Mongo features, it could certainly outshine Mongo for those scenarios.

AFAIK, map-reduce is relatively expensive on Mongo... typically recommended only for background execution, nothing synchronous.

Unacknowledged writes are disturbing but this can happen in any system: data hits the disk, and just before the server can send an ack to the client, it crashes.

That same blog notes Postgres is susceptible to the same issue: http://aphyr.com/posts/282-call-me-maybe-postgres

Your analogy rests on the absurd assumption that mission critical components don't need to be fully vetted and understood.

Shady? Yes. Dishonest? No. To be sure, both of these attributes suck, but beyond that there is an absolute world of difference between the two. One passively leaves knowledge gaps that even novice consumer programmers would uncover (the source is wide open after all, and speaking from personal experience, any claims of hyper performance should arouse enough suspicion to inspire some basic research), while the other asserts no knowledge gaps and actively inhibits knowledge discovery.

That said, they fell very far form the ideal, and for that they should be faulted. They're now paying the price by living in a dense fog of distaste and disgust. I don't think anyone believes it's a "statistics fluke" but it's a likely that a mob/tribal mentality plays some role (this is an industry notoriously susceptible to cargo cults) and that many individuals on the burn-MongoDB-at-the-stake bandwagon do not actually have deep--or moderate!--experience with it and competing products. Also, would you chalk it up to statistical anamoly that they were able to close funding and that many large scale systems use their product?

Isn't it possible that the company had shameful marketing practices that repel the programmer psyche, but that the product itself has a unique enough featureset (schemaless yet semi-structured querying, indexing, dead simple partitioning and replication, non-proprietary management language, simple backups, all at the cost of RAM/SSD) to make it compelling for some problem classes?

Just enough leaks to conclude it's a Google-owned project. Although I can't offer an alternative explanation, I'm a bit skeptical in this post-Snowden world.

Hmm, there seems to be the implication that we've hit some magical end state in hardware development where consumer needs are forever met.

Personally, I think of these hardware market developments with an eye toward interplay with the software market. Historically, software developers had to consider the capabilities of consumer hardware in determining feature scope and user experience. Hardware capabilities served as a restraint on the product, and ignoring them could effectively reduce market size. The effect was two-sided though, with new more demanding software driving consumers to upgrade. Currently, in this model, the hardware stagnation can be interpreted as mutually-reinforcing conditions of software developers not developing to the limit of current hardware to deliver marketable products, and consumers not feeling the need to upgrade. In a sense, the hardware demands of software have stagnated as well.

From this, I wonder if the stagnation is due to a divergence in the difficulty in developing software that can utilize modern computing power in a way that is useful/marketable from that of advancing hardware. Such a divergence can be attributed to a glut of novice programmers that lack experience in large development efforts and the increasing scarcity and exponential demand for experienced developers. Alternatively, the recent increase in the value of design over raw features could inhibit consideration of raw computing power in product innovation. Another explanation could be that changes to the software market brought about by SaaS, indie development, and app store models seem to promote smaller, simpler end-user software products (e.g. web browsers vs office suites).

I wouldn't be surprised if this stagnation is reversed in the future (5+ years from now) from increased software demands. Areas remain for high-powered consumer hardware, including home servers (an area that has been evolving for some time, with untapped potential in media storage, automation and device integration, as well as resolving increasing privacy concerns of consumer SaaS, community mesh networking and resource pooling, etc), virtual reality, and much more sophisticated, intuitive creative products (programming, motion graphics, 3d modeling, video editing, audio composition, all of which I instinctively feel are ripe for disruption).

With all due respect, anecdotes vs opinion? A blurry distinction if ever there was one. Who gets to be the arbiter of that distinction, and placement in "the" hierarchy of HN comments? It's plain as day that girvo's comment as much as jeswin's included first hand accounts of real world events (Greg and his myopia regarding non-MS tech, and satisfied friends/family/grandfather/customers that demonstrate MS' market viability). jeswin's comment as much as girvo's included personal opinion.

There was a recent HN discussion about anti-MS bias on the site. I wonder if that may be relevant.

I find it a much bigger "F U" to host an issue tracker and completely ignore it (perhaps while you continue development on other features), or worse, close new items out of hand. At least he's taken the time to clarify what can be expected of him. To me, that's a simple show of respect toward the community.

I applaud his approach, at it demonstrates respect to other developers by explicitly communicating what others can expect of him. Although it's not required, I would hope that all devs who open source a project without any intention of heeding public issue trackers follow suit and proactively clarify that intention.

(Nothing--philosophically or legally--requires anyone to maintain an issue tracker for an open source project. There was a time when open source typically amounted to a tarball on an FTP server, and maybe a -dev list.)

Dear poster, don't imply all startups are equal.

If a startup asks you to solve math puzzles, it's possible that the work you will be doing heavily involves the creative use of math or information analysis. (This is more broadly valuable than many people recognize.)

Also, it's also possible that that particular startup doesn't know how to effectively interview.

It doesn't sensationalisticly mean all Startups (capitalization yours) don't know how to effectively interview.

Also, rather than focus on your ability to learn, I would humbly recommend you reconsider the basic nature of employment. An interview should be considered a two-way conversation. You're not selling yourself as a slave, you're entering into a mutually-beneficial, private, voluntary arrangement. Thus, even someone who goes into an interview willing to accept anything and everything they offer could be expected to ask simply, "And what exactly will I be doing?" But better yet, grill them about every nitty-gritty detail you can think of. Although some insecure interviewers may be taken aback (I'm guilty of asserting the interviewer was wrong on more than one occasion, both times still receiving an offer), I for one am impressed when a candidate demonstrates a sharp, critical and skeptical mind in this way.