microcentury

I am a business person rather than a programmer, but I can tell you from my end that I have never seen a rewrite take only as long was as planned. If that two months becomes four months, you have 'lost' one-third of your runway. And there's not going to be much point having a product everyone can work on when there is no money to pay anyone.

That was my thought. And if it's correct, it's not worth it given the aff link is visible at the Amazon page, and if there was ever a crowd that would know to check for it, this is it.

Anyway, there's nothing wrong with the aff links. Profit is fun.

'It’s spring of 1241, and the West is shitting its pants' Considering how much I have been looking forward to this, that is a terrible, teenage opening line for the website. And from Stephenson! Gah. I would have expected better.

I would be interested in hearing more about how you've done this with online ads.

Here's a random greyhound racing tip which a man in a bar told me, so it must be true: before the race, leave it as long as possible to bet and watch the dogs. The one that is quivering and dancing and looks must wound up generally wins. Wait until you get a race where only one dog looks that way.

This makes perfect intuitive sense to me and is reflected frequently in my life. I have a job where I can often get away with doing very little, but if I do that I feel bad (and it creates a negative spiral). If instead I engage and work hard, I feel much better, but it seems I am always batting a innate preference for inaction. Or just laziness :-)

I read the tone as not literally meaning news has broken, but rather an attempt at summoning the spirit of the 1920s newscasts. The rest of the article seems to support that interpretation, with the references to more innocent times and so on.

Wikipedia seems to think his fame is not quite as clear-cut as the man himself sees it:

This article may not meet the notability guideline for biographies. Please help to establish notability by adding reliable, secondary sources about the topic.

Quick typo feedback on your site: 'We accept donation now' should be 'donations' :-)

'...365 days at the very least for the first year.' I guess the second year must be a leap year :-)

Seriously though, this is a great article and I admire anyone who is able to provide this level of commitment and passion.

This looks like an article written to match a desired headline. The control device is hardly 'fundamental' to the concept of a web-enabled TV.

Pedantic point: that's the first ad at the top, not the first search result (which is not clear in the video).

Obvious as all this seems, I've found in managing people that it's generally something they have to learn for themselves from scratch. And it was something I had to learn for myself. It's so much easier to wrap yourself in the comfortable delusion that you're right and everyone else is a moron - those idiots in Department X have no idea how anything works and have no sense of the strategy etc etc. Engaging with the full complexity of a situation and still finding a path forward is something that comes with maturity.

Huge, and consistently pursued by the Register. Don't have time at this moment to dig up links to illustrate, but every time there's an anti-Google story the Register are right up there misinterpreting it to maximum 1984 effect.

That was excellent. Had to suppress mild urge to run away.

Putting cameras in places where it's not safe to put a person seems to be a rich field to explore.

Jeez dude... Do you really equate human and animal life? I have lots of sympathy with your position in general, and I don't have a good answer for why I don't go vegetarian, but this seems extreme to me.

Yup. Sound the Reddit alarm.

That was an exceptionally well-written review - '[S]muggling gems of empirical knowledge across the literary border...' is a wonderful phrase. Book sounds great. Ordered.

"At my salary level, and with my expected advancement path, I could comfortably retire in my thirties."

I've heard this or statements like it in quite a few articles over the years, but I've never actually met a retired thirties business consultant. Do they exist and am I just missing them? The only ones I know are well into their thirties, working 70+ hours a week, and looking forward to making even larger boatloads in their forties.

I think this is the first time I've seen the 'death of journalism' blamed on the writing being too _good_...

I wish this young chap nothing but the best, but this is really not why I visit HN.

A few years ago I worked as a journalist, and one of the major events at the time was news photographers hating the fact that newspapers were sending out normal reporters with DSLRs and telling them to take 200+ shots. Most of the time, they took a usable photograph. The pro news photographers said, 'But you can't expect an untrained person to take good photographs!' And they insisted that the papers stop sending out camera-armed news reporters.

The thing with that, though, was that if you John Random Reporter couldn't take pictures of near-equivalent quality to a John Pro Photographer, the papers would stop doing it. But they didn't. If the photographers' point was true, they had nothing to worry about. But they knew they did indeed have something to worry about. The truth was that the amateurs could come close enough to equalling the pros that the trade off versus cost savings was worth it.

There is a parallel here with closed versus open systems. We howl, 'You can't do that!! Closed systems canot possibly equal the innovation and development of open!!' And if that's the case, we have nothing to worry about. Quite possibly, though, that is not the case. The insistence on closed that seems so anathema to much of the history of software development may in fact be a good thing for the end user, and our howls of outrage nothing more than being called on something that is no longer true.

That sense of threat would at least explain the inordinate number of HN stories on this topic.

This guys seems like he'd be a total nightmare to work with. And that's NOT BULLSHIT.

Just FYI, I used the word 'handicapped' in conversation recently and brought it to a grinding awkward halt. The preferred term is 'disabled', apparently due to the 'hand in cap' associations of 'handicapped.' YMMV :-)

I thought that too, it doesn't have the ring of reality about it.

Even if true, as others has commented, this is far from the most ruthless behaviour in a corporate environment. Taking credit for others' work, blaming your mistakes on other people, creating an impression of doing more than you are, undermining people who are your rivals indirectly and behind the scenes, grinding down the people below you as soon as you move up (and sometimes doing so in the name of 'helping' them and showing you can make the 'tough decisions')... These are commonplace where I work among a certain cadre of people, and I work in one of the more enlightened big companies.

This is resting on the rather significant assumption that you are a _successful_ entrepreneur. There are plenty of entrepreneurs out there with less than $1m in net work who are struggling in the current climate.

It may originally come from the Bible, but that line is indelibly linked with MLK. I agree with rauljara - that headline is tone-deaf and tacky, though the article itself is well-written and informative.

I'm guessing they mean 'virtual team', maybe? i.e. a team spread across a bunch of reporting lines, functions or offices that works on this one specific project, forming a 'virtual' team.

Do you have any particular resources in mind that you could share?

Good Lord. I almost feel sorry for Mike Arrington. But not quite.