mikecarroll

Thanks! I'd be really curious to know if other folks on HN are doing something similar.

I've been talking about this a lot the last year, and sometimes the reaction is "never heard of that" and sometimes it's "we've been doing that for a while now".

True -- there are LOTS of engineering managers who would struggle greatly with the move. They are just too far away from the details and haven't been hands-on in long enough... and don't want to be "in the weeds" anymore. (Good luck to them).

But by the same principle inverse argument is that a lot "tech leads" have the opposite problem: there's no point at which they have been out of the weeds.

That's a key skill that managers have to learn to early: what are the things you DON'T have to look at or know to be most effective. If you are reviewing every bug fix, or have to sit in on every single planning session, you will very quickly hit ceiling of your career as a manager.

I think that a great manager who has done the tech lead job and always worked a few levels above it is best positioned to succeed. But completely agree that good tech leads are very well positioned to make this move too.

Makes CBInsights look pretty good, actually.

Yeah, fair point. It was a legitimate question when I posted this -- the page wasn't loading and some weird text was appearing at the bottom.

Not sure there's a way to remove the link on HN and just make this a discussion, otherwise I would do so.

I have a feeling the lesson at the end of this is going to involve setting longer TTLs.

It's struggling to load though -- I don't think the hacker was anywhere near ready for Craigslist levels of traffic.

Maybe somebody hijacked their DNS?

My favorite bit from this article:

“A tobacco store lady talking about physics in the wee hours of the morning doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me,” [General Carey] said in an interview with Air Force investigators, according to the report. “You need to watch out for that because that’s just like our training says, you know, people are trolling for information.”

*

Nuclear disarmament never sounded like a better idea.

Yeah, the Blueprint folks are great: They've been amazing sponsors for the Health Devs meetup group and have hosted our meetups in their space since we started.

I organize Health Devs, which is pretty much exactly as you describe: we do monthly events where people show off things they've created, get help on code, etc. Our next meetup, on Tuesday, will focus on the Open mHealth project: http://www.meetup.com/HealthDevsNYC/events/138467042/

We are always looking for people to help organize more events though, and would love to have you (or anybody else interested) involved. Events are informal and always free. Shoot me a line: michael @ aqua.io

I'm trying to think of what else to do, too. The current strategy of elected officials, all the way up to Obama, is to try to change the conversation (to the economy, to the Zimmerman shooting, to the credibility of Snowden as a person, etc.).

I'm planning on keeping up on Mike Rogers until I get a response, and keeping the correspondence public until the shame factor kicks in and he gives a response. If somebody has a better idea than that, please let me know.

I wrote an e-mail to Congressman Mike Rogers about his misleading quote in this article. I encourage others to reuse my template and also ask him to justify his misleading remarks about Snowden's statement: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6134672

We should start hold our public servant to task for lying to the American people about these programs.

Right--it's easy for the Chinese government to restrict the points of exchange for bitcoin into other currencies, like banks (most of which are state-owned), mobile phone recharge cards, credit cards, etc.

Doing that would leave bitcoin only attractive to the elite that can move their country in and out of the money easily. But then the obvious question is: for folks that can already move money around easily outside of government control--why would those people want to take on the extra risk inherent in bitcoins?

Yeah, sorry, no numbers... I was drawing on anecdotal experiences.

I've also been to Nazca and my impression was that though the tourist traffic was only a tiny fraction of Machu Picchu, the town couldn't handle much more of it. Even in off season the airport was booked to capacity and people had to wait hours for scheduled flights.

Another example (besides Machu Picchu) that comes to mind is Paracas (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paracas_National_Reserve). It's hardly a mainstream tourist attraction, but the degradation from the tourist industry was pretty apparent when I visited in 2009, despite being a protected area.

From the About Us: "PeruThisWeek.com and LivinginPeru.com are part of the Peru Experience family, a company whose goal is to promote Peru all over the world"

I think the underlying message in this bit of sensationalist journalism is that foreign tourists to should hurry and visit the Nazca lines right away, before they get completely destroyed and are forever lost.

The sad thing is that Peru can barely balance the tourist traffic it gets already while still preserving its natural sites and artifacts. Who know how much damage to the lines would result from a rush of tourists trying to see them before they are gone?

The big issue here is not that "the public can't even understand a basic chemical formula"--it's that so many people are willing to take something they hear in a morning radio show at face value (and panickedly call up the local utility, rather than search online for verification).

Seems that a lot of the advantages cited as coming from the co-founders having overlapping skills in this post could just as easily (and better) be explained as deriving from all the experiences of past startup failures the author mentions.

Maybe I'm just missing something, but something critical like keeping strategic conversations focused, intellectually honest, and positive seems to have less to do with the founder skill sets (and the amount of overlap in them) than it has to do with personality, previous startup experience, and having pre-aligned expectations.

This is also a big problem in health tech: the people that are good at identifying the problems (doctors, public health officials, etc.) don't communicate them but instead focus on convincing others to build their vision of the solution (which tend to be inadequate, or even counterproductive).

Given that the author is the founder of health tech startup (EligibleAPI.com), it's hard not to read this as being implicit in the post :)

Great--another graph that simplifies political discourse into a few vague terms that are, themselves, highly politicized.

Even if something like this were somehow representative of the range of political discourse, I struggle to see what real value it would bring. I agree that we should not allow others to set the rules of a political discussion as a choice between X and not X, but how is limiting ourselves to thinking in terms of just three criteria, instead of just one, much better?

While I agree that URLs should be considered intrinsic to good UI, social media is also undermining the value/importance of semantic URLs.

Why put extra work into making your RESTful URL structure more semantic, in other words, if Twitter if just going to shorten them to the point that they are no longer fully readable, or Facebook is just going to hide them behind a preview view?

Mention it in your cover letter when you apply and pass it off as a strength, not a weakness--show what you, from your experiences with your stammer understand about using web development to communicate with users that other developers just wouldn't naturally understand.

Then, when you go get invited for an interview, make sure you control the variables of the situation beforehand: remind the person who schedules the interview that you have a stammer and ask if you can bring a tablet computer to use to help communicating with the interviewer (or something similar that would work). If you set the rules for how the interview proceeds beforehand, it should give you control of the situation and show that you are in control of being able to communicate and work successfully despite the stammer.