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Such a tool would be no less difficult to build than hack itself, though. Hack's "gradual typing" solves the problem of re-using existing code that you've mentioned.

FB already had a PyLint-like tool earlier that could do some static analysis, namely pfff (also open source and written in OCaml), but it did not provide a full-on static type system like Hack. (Background: I used pfff when I was in bootcamp at FB itself. This was however prior to hack, I worked solely on C++, Java, and a bit of Python at FB after bootcamp).

I am sure if FB started off with Python, a similar solution could have been found, but if you're looking for a tool that exists _right_ now, Hack is actually quite decent.

Creating a static type system, implement local type inference, as well as working out "gradual typing" and associated problems (all while being able to do type-checking at speeds developer _expect_) is not a trivial problem.

Is there a statically typed variant of Python that would work with existing web servers, etc..? I am aware that there's Cython and I know that py3k technically permits type annotations (which Jetbrain's Python IDE uses quite effectively), but that isn't true static type checking in the same way as Hack does this.

It's very easy to underestimate how difficult building a database from scratch (or even making large incremental changes to an existing one) is.

Another way to think of it is to think of an core database engine as analogous to a part of a propulsion mechanism. You can "demo" the core to show that a technology has promise. In case of a DB, you'd use a micro-benchmark with a synthetic workload; in case of a propulsion mechanism, you could use a software simulation.

The full RDBMS (transactions and locking, query optimization, buffer pool, etc...) takes far longer to build.

Finally, the equivalent of a "spaceship" here would not be more than the RDBMS, but a full ecosystem of systems software, middleware, and applications (e.g., app servers, messaging, CRM, ERP, etc..)

Indeed, that's why I said rational self-interest and not just profit. His self-interest involves advancing science and technology.

"[I would] rather discover one cause than gain the kingdom of Persia." - Democritus

There is no slippery slope here if the law is states something like: "contracts between existing de-facto oligarchy of car manufacturers and dealers remain as is, new entrants are free to set their own terms".

Everyone is talking about how we can't trust Elon Musk since he is acting in his rational self-interest. Yet why should we assume that Christie is acting out of the pure goodness of the heart? Politicians too act in their self-interest and that kind of self-interest often involves maximization of power. The currency of politics is not just cash (that helps too, of course!), but also favours: you can be sure that in return for this favour, he'll ask something from the dealership industry which would beneficial to his political career (e.g., the first thing that pops would be to accept additional vehicle taxes, which would help Christie carry and receive donations from environmentally conscious voters in a liberal state susceptible to flooding)

(Edit: remove an incorrect assertion. Laws regarding specific individuals are constitutional, just not "bills of attainder")

Ah, got it. It also seems the more useful the drug, the higher the pressure for low cost generic licensing (though, then again, the larger the circulation).

I wonder if an X-Prize like model might work better here, with, e.g., individuals with genetic risk for a specific cancer "crowd funding" various grades of prizes, with the actual awarding of prizes, setting and advertising the prizes, being done by an organization/consortium that knows what they're doing.

I loved Deepness In The Sky, one of the darkest ("Age of Failed Dreams", twentieth-century style authoritarianism coupled with technologies of the future, etc...) and yet most fascinating pieces of fiction. It's also one of the few (along with Vinge's other work) to depict distributed systems (in this sensor networks) in a realistic manner.

Couple of things to keep in mind though:

- With the exception of the spiders and two other aliens, most of the civilizations the Qeng Ho (another romanization of Zheng He, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zheng_He) are human. As a result (and based on their historical and software archives), they are able to understand what drives the civilization they deal with. Even then, however, contact with some of them turns out for the worse (The Emergents in this case) at least in the short term (and by short I here I mean decades -- human life is extended due to medical advances and suspended animation, and that's not taking into the account relativistic effects, e.g., by the time one comes back to their planet, the civilization on that planet may have already fallen).

- Qeng Ho is better termed as a culture: they're certainly not a government much less an empire. The book goes very deep into this angle and I won't go further to avoid plot spoilers.

- Relativistic time dilation ("grandfather paradox") plays a huge role here in travel. The civilizations rely on Bussards Ramjets (which seem to be impractical, magnetic sails would be more likely) and constant acceleration and then (from half-way point) deceleration: they're effectively marooned if they're unable to repair or refuel their "ram scoops", so they're taking bets that whenever they reach their target, the civilization on the other end is able to repair the ships. Again, that works well if the civilizations are human: even if the civilization has fallen into barbarism (like Pham Nuwen's home, Canberra -- where they've lost even radio and aircraft) it's possible to rebuild based on archaeology, knowledge of human nature (arranging deals and trades), and (as the parent mentioned) radio communications.

So I think this is where the analogy fails: it's possible to have an inter-stellar culture without faster than light travel or communications, but probably only as long as civilizations already familiar with each other are within light decades.

Fire Upon the Deep is quite fascinating in the sense of what is possible with FTL, although even there it seems that there are mostly cultures as opposed to empires (with Skroderiders -- the sci-fi aliens I want to meet most in real life! -- being the equivalent of Qeng Ho)

I think part of it also diminishing returns: life of cancer patients has been greatly improved, with early detection it's no longer a death sentence and at times not even a major handicap. See, e.g., quality of life after treatment of prostate cancer now vs. quality of life after treatment of prostate cancer treatment just 20-30 years ago.

I imagine power law holds in most disciplines: going from 99.99% uptime to 99.999% is far harder than going from 99.9 to 99.99% which in turn is harder then going from 99% to 99.9%. Likewise, I'd imagine same holds true with death tolls over N years from various illnesses (but obviously with different constants involved).

Can you explain to me what you meant by externalities here? Do you mean medical industry benefits from cures without contributing to funding the NIH grants?

Kafka is focused more on throughput rather than latency: if latency is critical, you should use a database rather than a message queue (may be with some caveats, e.g., for finance, telcos, or air traffic control; TIBCO et al cover that market well, however).

Kafka's use of the JVM does not really impact throughput. Very little portion of the messages' lifecycle is spent in the JVM heap, Kafka makes aggressive us of the OS page-cache and avoids copies (e.g., using sendfile() whenever possible).

I agree that, e.g., if Kafka had to make heavy use of in-process memory (this is appropriate for databases) as opposed to OS managed buffers, then a language without a garbage collector (or perhaps a garbage collected language that gave you an option not to generate garbage in the first place...) would help.

That said, there's other advantages to using C++, but they won't bring significant performance improvements -- although I suppose one could experiment with, e.g., using AIO but that might end up causing more harm than good in case of Kafka.

As the "slow compilation times" feature, scalac and sbt do a much better job of it than cmake and g++/clang :-)

Hmm, I think I've mis-read your comment then. My apologies. That said, if you don't mind I'll let it stand as is -- perhaps as a comment on the OP. My point is "cancer research OR Facebook" is not a choice anyone goes out to make consciously: they study a specialty and then seek out the most rewarding (according to their own definition of "rewarding") career options available to them. If one is interested in building distributed systems, there is simply more opportunity to do so at Google, Facebook, or other places in the software/Internet industry than in other industries (that's not to say those opportunities don't exist elsewhere, of course).

I do agree that it's B.S. to say that legal challenges prevent investment in cancer research (unless people mean "coconut oil cures cancer" type of research, in which case they well should). I would probably say that if anything current patent law makes cancer research more profitable that it would be without it (however, I don't have enough of legal background to speak definitively on this).

What people miss is the incredible amount of infrastructure development done at Facebook. While it would be an honest statement that it's behind Google (which takes a different approach to infrastructure) in that respect, it also differs crucially from Google that much of it is open source. As a mater of fact, here is one example of code that Facebook contributed heavily to (and that I've worked on as well) that is being used (amongst many other things) to cure cancer: http://www.slideshare.net/ryancox/20101207-o-connortrihughba...

Not everyone is a geneticist or a bioinformatician. Not everyone who has the capability to write code that Facebook need has the capability to become as good of a geneticists as they are a programmer. Yet, it's not fair to say that this talent is wasted: some Facebookers have contributed to open source, others have joined infrastructure companies (much as others have come from those companies).

Why haven't I instead went to work directly for, e.g., NASA or a national lab? Well first, as an undergraduate I deeply _wanted_ to take an internship at NASA (they had a great program for local students) but couldn't as only US citizens were permitted to do so.

I was already well into a full-time industry job when I became a US citizen (I've also worked at startups prior to attending college: again, I highly doubt NASA or a research lab would just hire a high school student ). Now I've already heard too many horror stories from classmates working for various government/aerospace/hardware/other traditional orgs about the low autonomy, office-space-esque working condition (be in the office by 8:30 AM, or there'll be a "talk", even if you've worked late into evening), but most importantly about how most of the folks working there are not doing the kind of work I am. Those that _did_ do that kind of work first had to expand a lot of energy proving what was apparently at the start -- that sometimes building something from scratch is less work (both now and later) than trying to shoehorn a problem to an existing but ill-fitting abstraction.

Fortunately, I am seeing this change for the better -- and many places (e.g., LLNL) already stand out -- but for now I'll quote Thiel: "rocket scientists go to Wall St for money, but also because aren't allowed to play with rockets anymore!"

Obligatory disclaimer: I'm a former Facebook employee and am holding on to my RSUs, but I've sad much the same long before I've worked at Facebook (indeed, this is why I chose to work there!). I am not speaking solely for myself, not on any company's behalf.

obvious short is obvious

"$400m" is not moderately wealthy, it's extremely wealthy.

Most moderately or even extremely wealthy people are obscure. One of the wealthiest people I've worked for had a saying: "it's good to be wealthy but not famous." He dressed like a slob, drove a generic Japanese car, lived in a moderate house but in Los Altos (i.e., given the money he went for a safer location as opposed to a gigantic house), and so forth... He never once talked about finance issues despite being involved in angel investments, exits, etc... Most importantly, you'd never see his name in a press release much less in a newspaper story (except once I think, where he was referred to as an engineer as opposed to his actual title).

However, Dorian Nakomoto's situation is far worse in that he's perceived as wealthy, but actually isn't: so he can't afford security, lawyers, a gated house (remember, he went through foreclosure -- he can barely afford a house at all!), and so on forth... He's sixty five years old, his mother is 90. He can't run, he's post-stroke so he likely won't be able defend himself even with a firearm. He also has much more at stake than others: he can't simply hand the home invaders or extortionists the money if, e.g., one of his relatives is kidnapped. Is this so hard to understand? Do you personally hate bitcoin so much that you're willing to be an apologist for endangerment of someone who isn't even involved in bitcoin?

So first of all some background: I grew up during the fall of USSR. Our family had little liquid money, but my dad had a 386 computer (this was early 90s) provided by an American firm. My parents told me to never disclose that fact to others for a simple reason: people will assume we have far more money than we actually do (386s were not cheap!, most of my classmates had Sinclairs, Elektronika's, and XTs), we'll suffer a home invasion, and -- this was very common in former USSR republics in early 90s -- torture in search of that money that we don't have. When you hear stories of people being tortured with soldering irons and blow torches on regular news, you tend to become immensely paranoid about sums much smaller than $400mm and concepts much more technical than Bitcoin (as in, differences between various makes of processors!)

The criminals don't think "Bitcoin, the neat crypto-currency, let's hack his network and steal his private keys if we can!". Criminals think "wow, this guy has something that can be exchanged for $400mm, let's hold a clothes iron to his (or his mother's!) feet until he gives it to us!".

We can only speculate, but I'd imagine the real Satoshi is a human being and doesn't want an uninvolved senior citizen (and his relatives, including a 90 year old mother) to be made targets for violent crime.

It's highly ironic that the media paints cryptocurrency as tools for a coldhearted clique that only cares for their own material wealth, yet they're the ones cruelly exposing someone who has done them no wrong and (in the case of the Newsweek journalist) refusing to apologize. What happened to kindness and respect?

> The principal under which Escalante's program flourished (Henry Gradillas) was a big contributor to the success, but even so, he wasn't invited back after a sabbatical, and it's reasonable to speculate that he'd run afoul of the community which employed him when he'd prioritized academics over athletics.

That's even more heartbreaking to hear. Everyone's opinion seemed to have matter, except that of the students, whose careers and educations were at stake.

>> Escalante's open admission policy, a major reason for his success, also paved the way for his departure. Calculus grew so popular at Garfield that classes grew beyond the 35-student limit set by the union contract. Some had more than 50 students. Escalante would have preferred to keep the classes below the limit had he been able to do so without either denying calculus to willing students or using teachers who were not up to his high standards. Neither was possible, and the teachers union complained about Garfield's class sizes. Rather than compromise, Escalante moved on.

When I say (to non-Californians) that teacher's unions have too much power in California and am accused of being a right-wing wacko, I generally call this example out.

Unions have been responsible for much good (better working conditions, higher pay, etc...) but that doesn't give them a pass to screw students over.

> I suspect the jump from "Nazis might kill me" to "poor in America was roughly the same jump as "poor in America to working in technology"

From personal experience, the first was _far greater_. To quote my brother (who became quite successful as well), I'd rather clean streets in US than live in former USSR again.

Being poor in America is by no means pleasant, but the change from being middle-class but 1) from a wrong ethnic group 2) (in my personal case) with a heavily individualistic orientation in former USSR was _far_ worse (one word: "conscription").

There might be some talent at Yahoo, but its exodus can't be denied. However, I did actually see Yahoo re-attract some talent after Mayer's ascent. So as with most anything else, you have to deal with it on a case-by-case basis and neither "hire anyone from Yahoo without any consideration" nor "never hire anyone who worked at Yahoo past a certain date" are both wrong.

That said, majority of Yahoo employees fit neither into "not employable elsewhere" nor "absolute genius who is hanging on because he is working on the Cure Cancer feature of Yahoo Horoscopes". Far more common were/are people who joined either from graduate school, a startup that burnt them out, a far crappier industry (e.g., government, finance, etc...), who wanted to do something cool (and usually there were chances to do that at least initially on the team you joined) and stayed despite much badness (e.g., their project being cancelled) _not_ because they did not think they could do something as good elsewhere, but because being at Yahoo was a known quantity of pain.

That's the default mode of behavior for most people and it's fine to hire these kinds of people as long as there are others to balance them out -- but not into leadership roles at startups (anyone of the first 15 people in a startup is probably in a leadership role even as an individual contributor). That said there are limits: there were people who were doing very little in their roles and thought neither internal transfers, nor job transfers, nor personal side projects -- I'd have a hard time hiring such a person.

Keep in mind that WhatsApp founders did leave to found WhatsApp (obviously...) and when they were at Yahoo they worked on very challenging and interesting things. They were early employees (as in 96-98), (de-facto or de-jure) technical leaders, and Yahoo was their baby: they had a vested interested and non-negligible ability to have a positive impact at Yahoo and they certainly did.

The entire survival of Yahoo under a specific business model was staked to this. At the time -- this was my first job out of college -- I didn't care at all about those aspects, but the technical learnings for me (primordial NoSQL data stores, software-based high availability, hugely distributed architecture spanning many continents, what later came to be known as "devops" practice, etc...) were immense.

I have to agree with you here. The problem with insurance for routine care (the system we have in US) is that it makes the information asymmetry problem worse: since it's someone else's job to negotiate the price of routine day-to-day items, there's no incentive for individuals to make sure they're getting a good deal. This is equivalent to going through automobile insurance for oil changes and other routine maintenance.

I made many of the same points recently (albeit in a cheesy Facebook post -- https://www.facebook.com/alex.feinberg/posts/101002165710317...), but I had a different take on this: I saw this as a hearkening to Valley's original values as opposed to a media-fueled distortion of them that doesn't quite correspond to on-the-ground reality.

Full disclosure: I worked at Facebook and am still holding on to some stock. I also worked on a project ("Panama") with Acton at Yahoo and knew the reputation of others involved in WhatsApp like Rick Reed. Rick Reed built a high performance messaging bus in C++ at Yahoo that was the foundation of much of Yahoo infra outside of search, so the use of Erlang was not a surprise for me. Nonetheless, I'm sure my opinion would be the same even if I never worked at FB or Yahoo and didn't know of anyone involved.

Keep in mind that while I know nothing of Brian's rejection from FB (it happened before my time), but "Facebook has good talent" is not mutually exclusive with "Facebook rejected some really great people". It's also very likely that he was going for a more senior/leadership position and interviewing engineering leadership is an even more of a dubious "science" than interviewing individual contributors.

> Why it is hard to view working "just for healthcare" as positive? Is it hard to view working "just for money" as positive? I.e. suppose that one works only because one needs money and otherwise he would spend his time playing Tetris, walking on the beach and reading medieval poetry. Why is it negative that he still works and not lives off other's money and other's work, involuntary taken?

That doesn't sound quite correct. Working just for the money is a neutral, the _negative_ here is involuntary taxation. I agree that it's in a negative (and have pointed out later in my comment a particularly bad form of it), but some kind of taxation is unavoidable (anarcho-capitalism is a fascinating theory, but none of its variants strike me as realistic).

Further, I'm not advocating a system that covers every single type of heath benefits for free. I'm simply talking about insurance against catastrophes and in some cases arguing against government interference -- e.g., the kind that essentially made healthcare go through employers and insurance agencies, as opposed to Milton Friedman's idea of MSAs (a stronger form of HSAs/high-deductible insurance -- something that ACA has actually made more expensive).

Essentially it's about marginal utility: having no healthcare available is much worse than not having certainly elective healthcare but having other healthcare. Likewise earning $0 vs. earning $15k a year (not enough to live on in Silicon Valley, but ok for getting by elsewhere in the country) is much bigger difference than the difference between earning $15k and $30k, which is a much bigger difference than going betwen earning $30k and $45k. No one should be entitled to a comfortable life, but I don't think a system where individuals who are not employable (whether involuntarily or voluntarily) are left to rely on charity alone is one that will ever be created (irrespective of whether or not it could be theoretically justified). I'm an advocate of scraping the current welfare state and replacing it with a simple basic income payment (if that's not politically feasible, I'm fine with Friedman's idea of a negative income tax). This will actually lead to less government interference: less welfare programs, possibly lower (or at least no higher) taxes, and so forth. Here's an argument for this from a well known socialist organization Cato Institute (backed by such left-wing pinko commies as the Koch Brothers): http://www.libertarianism.org/columns/libertarian-case-basic...

Furthermore, in terms of reducing tax rates, I strongly favour slashing military and police spending (no SWAT teams for tiny suburbs), ending the drug war, and cutting middle class entitlement programs (or at least privatizing them or making them voluntary).

> If you raise salaries for a wide class of employees - what do you think will happen to the housing prices? Also, where would the money come from? California has about 300K teachers. Each 10K of salary increase would cost 3 billion dollars (not counting pension costs, employer's part in taxes, etc. so actually more). Where those additional billions would come from?

Raising the salary is not the only way to do so: increasing the supply of housing. I live in Saratoga and lived in Mountain View: the avg price of a resident (averaged between condos, townhomes, and single family homes) is well north of $1mm in those areas. In Mountain View this can attributed to location (and Sunnyvale which is directly adjacent is cheaper, especially the north parts of Sunnyvale closer to Mountain View), but in Los/Gatos-Saratoga this is entirely due to minimum lot sizes (my place is currently worth significantly below that -- but due to being in a small area that was annexed to Saratoga and which retained much smaller lot sizes).

My point also wasn't about the need of higher pay, it was about job satisfaction having more to do with being over certain thresholds as opposed to the bizarre idea that it had something to do with how much I am making in relation to some CEO.

Re: salary itself. This also does not include the pay that is docked to go to unions (union membership is mandatory for teachers in California -- I am all in favour of removing that requirement for unions of government employees). These are closer to starting salaries of SWEs not average salaries of all engineers (my first job out of college was $85k in 2006 at Yahoo -- not exactly a company known for highest wages). Finally RSUs are a huge part of engineer's salaries: $100k in RSUs vested over four years (with refreshers) is common for even new college grads. I am not advocating raising everyone's salary of course. I am in favour of treating teachers more as software engineers: merit pay increases, performance reviews, and no traps like tenure -- much as with software engineers, it should be easy for teachers to switch schools or move to a different area if their pay is not satisfactory (and as with software engineers, it might mean some would leave the profession if they are doing it just for the money and money doesn't suffice, this again is a positive).

I think you mistook me as someone advocating greater taxation -- done in the same manner as today -- I am not; I actually believe we far less meddling in our lives, certain kinds of taxes could be lower (but perhaps other kinds -- e.g., tax on rent per Henry George), and so forth. However, I find that arguing about immediately abolishing all taxation (logical outcome of what you're advocating) are going to work -- I much prefer to acknowledge that the problems much of the left perceives are real, but offer solutions that are less coercive than status quo or other alternatives.

I think there's several separate issues: Krugman correctly points out that work disincentives are different from job destruction. However there are different kind of work disincentives: it is certainly hard to view people working _just_ for healthcare (as opposed to switching jobs, retiring early, or starting their own business) as something positive. By all means, disentangling healthcare from employment is at least a worthy goal -- there are many artificial reasons which currently make non-employer health insurance (and non-insurance health care) far more expensive than would otherwise be.

On the other hand, the individual mandate and increased price of even the most basic catastrophic coverage does seem to cut into disposable income, which (in a sense) has the equivalent effect of huge marginal tax hike: essentially as the salary increases, essential benefits decrease (no eligibility for food stamps, subsidizing housing, or subsidized healthcare), while taxes increase. Incentive to do anything other than get by decreases, strong incentives are created to cut out other "unavoidable" payments such as by moving to places with less expensive housing costs, even if at the cost of less employment opportunities. Replacing the system that offers increasingly little to honest working poor(1), but imposes regressive mandates to fund what are essentially transfers from working classes to middle-class senior citizens (e.g., medicare and social secure) with a a universal basic income (funded through income tax or perhaps a Georgist "rent tax") would help, but making it a political reality may be tricky but feasible ( see here for an interesting analysis from a "left-libertarian"/classic liberal perspective: http://bleedingheartlibertarians.com/2014/01/the-positive-po... )

This does not automatically imply that various "mandates" of are always bad policy, the job of policy advocates should not be to hand-wave issues, but to present them in a way such that the public could make an informed choice. There are many times where Krugman does an excellent job of this (indeed, I'd imagine he rightly sees this as the very point of his NYT column); yet, it's odd that while Tyler Cowen (another trained economist) discusses this topic in a great deal in Great Stagnation and Average is Over, Krugman does not mention this and talks about what is really a related, but separate (even if important) matter of income inequality. Honestly, I don't see how income inequality (which is a serious danger for many reasons -- I don't mean to handwave it) has a role in this: if we raised the salary of teachers in Bay Area to that of software engineers, these salaries will still remain minuscule compared to that of top CEOs, but does anyone doubt that this would greatly increase teachers' job satisfaction? The problem with low pay isn't that someone is paid higher, the problem is that low (or no) pay makes life extremely stressful as basic needs and rudimentary wants are harder to fill: never mind being able to send kids to college, it's more about being able to afford a place where kids have a room to themselves while still having room to grade class papers after work -- one can't afford this on a teacher's salary in most parts of Bay Area.

(1) This is what irks me a lot about the debate on this topic. It's one thing to argue that welfare programs are wrong because taxation is wrong (then your job is to prove that taxation is wrong), but if taxation is wrong why not first cut programs that impose a greater tax burden? Military and medicare spending each cost more than food stamps and don't seem especially under-funded, yet it's the food-stamps program that got cut.

There are two unmentioned issues in regards to stock grants and hiring:

1) Information asymmetry or just plain symmetric lack of information in regards to stock grants.

2) The price of a home in a decent school district within a "reasonable" (< 1 hour each way, i.e., no more than 2 hours a day total) commute to any cluster of software companies in Bay Area (whether SOMA, Peninsula, or South Bay).

The two are closely related. When startups are competing for people against Google or any of the young public (or pre-IPO) technology companies, the issue at stake isn't salary (post series-A, startups may pay a slightly below market salary, but not an egregiously low one) but RSUs ("restricted stock units" or essentially outright stock grants: while these are treated as income for the purpose of taxation, there's also no strike price and AMT trap to worry about).

The reasons why these grants (which are generally very far from the "retire on a yacht category") matter is that their ball-park value is known, they're often refreshed as part of the performance review cycle (as opposed to fixed during offer negotiation time), and if you plan on staying in Bay Area and having kids, you're relying upon them to either afford a house in a decent school district and with a reasonable commute, or to afford private school tuition.

Changing grant tactics can help with information asymmetry problem (transparency about finances and valuation is nowadays the rule rather than exception in early stage companies), but they can't help with mutual lack of information: neither the founders nor the investors know with certainty a general ballpark figure of what the value of the company price will be at a liquidity event, or if there will be a liquidity event in the first place.

What this means is that unless housing problems in Bay Area are addressed, in addition to the already well discussed negative externalities, startups will have an increasingly harder time hiring engineers that haven't yet experienced a liquidity event or spent four or more years at bigger companies. They would love to join a start-up, but not at the cost of their (future or existing) children's education.

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Unrelated to the above points, this paragraph is also as important as it should be obvious:

"Finally, most founders are not willing to spend the time it takes to source engineering candidates and convince them to come interview. You can't outsource this to a recruiter until the company is fairly well-established--you have to do it yourself."

If I receive a message from an external recruiter, it's hard to tell whether they really reasonably believe there's a good match between my skills and interest and the company, or if they're just employing a shotgun approach. I usually disregard these messages, even when I may be open to a new opportunity. On the other hand, if I receive a message from a founder or a tech lead, I try to reply even if (as, e.g., now) I'm not interested in interviewing: at the very least, it's likely they did actually mean to approach me specifically (not just anyone who has "Hadoop" in their profile), and I've an obligation to let them know that I'm not available at the moment as not to string them along.

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Finally, to underscore something else said in the article, in general, best way to hire good people, is to work on something good people enjoy working on, whether it's a greater mission or a good technical challenge. If neither of the two is there, the most straight forward startup recruiting pitch -- "come work on something cool with other smart people" -- fails.

I agree that building a product for customers is the end goal -- and that using every shiny new thing under the roof would be a distraction (with usual caveats/nuances of not being afraid to adapt new and promising technology when there's a good case to be made that it will bring concrete benefits -- e.g., Hadoop was a somewhat experimental platform in early 2008 and I was taking a technical risk introducing it in a 15 person advertising startup, but it was a huge net win).

However, to me love of technology is not playing with the latest node.js modules. While node.js is not my cup of tea, I can see how that be fun (I enjoy playing with the latest OCaml libraries, C++11 features, golang, etc..), but ultimately that alone isn't about technology. To me building technology is about reading a paper, extracting the core ideas, and applying them knowledge to implement a feature customers and no competitors offer is.

If we take this definition of technology, then there's plenty of place in startups for people who love technology. It depends on what the startup is building: if innovative technology (as opposed to an innovative business model) is at the core of the company's product, it's a great place for technologists. (There is of course nothing wrong with innovative business models -- nor are innovative business models mutually exclusive with innovative technologies; indeed, some of the greatest companies have combined the two!)

Now with big companies it is absolutely true that even if technology is not the core, challenges around availability, scalability, performance, etc... necessitate more than a trivial investment in technology.

"Startup" and "big company" are also not binary. I've joined LinkedIn when it was may be 200-300 people and even then we were solving some rather tough technical problems (you can read about some of the problems we solved in this paper that was accepted to USENIX FAST -- http://static.usenix.org/events/fast/tech/full_papers/Sumbal...). Although, the focus would have been more immediate had I joined LinkedIn when it was a 10 person startup -- but even at fairly early stages, the team was solving problems related to search and graph traversal, etc...)

There are people writing line of business code in 5000 person companies and there are people implementing query optimizers in FPGA in 10 person startups. It's very hard to make any generalizations and make categerical statements such as "if you love technology and tinkering, you should absolutely not work at a startup" or "to enjoy startups you have to love technology" (there are plenty of great startups founded by people who loved something more than they loved technology -- and these startups have made my life much more enjoyable as well!) I've done work that I am proud of in companies ranging in size from 15 to 14,000 people and learned tons in all of these environments (with various trade offs for companies of different sizes).

(Shameless plug: I hack on distributed systems in C++ at Cloudera -- and we do plenty of other cool things, despite not being a big company. Like distributed systems, databases/data stores, file systems, query processing, and more? Drop me a line.)

That's not exactly a relevant comparison. We're not talking about a Prop 8 or DOMA supporter lecturing Russia. We're talking about a Google using their enormous soapboax to do so in a fresh, defiant, and powerful way.

Google has been quite active in fighting for gay marriage within US, submitting amici briefs to the court cases, spending money on campaigns, and so forth...

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense actually: basic income + no minimum wage (or if politically impossible, not raising minimum wage) -- since the basic income will continue even if someone is employed, it's a great incentive to stay to in the labour force and advance even if the pay is minimal.

I do think that Milton Friedman may not have foreseen the way automation might lead to at least long-term (but perhaps not permanent) structural unemployment.

They seem to be aiming this at the server market: the volumes will be lower than tablet and phone chips.

First, it's a form of redistribution of wealth: assuming it's used with a progressive system of taxation.

I completely agree that we can't know how it will turn out in the long term (but why not try it and scrape it if it doesn't?), but the idea is that individuals could use the income to retrain when forced out of work, and to be able to provide an environment for their kids that give their them at least a chance at upwards mobility.

Again, I don't think it will lead to perfect equality. Nor is it a magic bullet: one pet-peeve is that everyone seems to be concerned with income, but less so with wealth per-se. Some people have proposed a tax on land itself but not improvements to land: I am not trained in economics so I can't speak to its efficacy (perhaps it's an outmoded idea today), but from a moral standpoint such a tax (with perhaps a "homestead exemption" for one's primary residence up to a certain value) seems a lot more fair than an income or property tax (which also taxes improvements to property that benefit the community).