369 karma · joined June 6, 2012
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=353654It certainly was -- on multiple levels, but ultimately up at the C-level. Blaming a single person (let a lone a junior engineer) for it just perpetuates the inbred culture of clusterfuckitude and cover-ass-ery which no doubt was the true root cause of the fuck-up in the first place.
What an incredibly cocky and pretentious view of the world.
Almost by definition, anyone who really is a badass, rockstar, ninja, etc. at what they do is viscerally repelled by the cockiness exuding from job ads seeking people who describe themselves as such... and would never dream of applying for such jobs.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4464298...and pretty soon, before you know it in fact, we won't be able to power them down, either. Or disconnect the cameras or mikes.
"But hey, they're only $40 now, and the retina displays are just fantastic..."
1984, Book 1, Chapter V
Now you just need to grab a few more more domains, e.g. "EscapeMyDate.com", etc.
http://news.ycombinator.org/item?id=4487658
Even though its title also mentions the Unnameable Politician.
That is, whatever the cause-and-effect relationship between decimalization and IPOs, it's a bit fatuous to maintain that outsize IPOs are, by themselves, "good" for the economy.
Nor is it what the content of the article implies.
Till pretty soon, even more so than for their considerable accomplishments, they become famous for... not wanting to be famous:
That's not "travel." That's "staying with friends." Completely useless to compare day-to-day budgets for the two categories.
On that note, I'm sure I'd save a heck of a lot of my day-to-day expenses in the major city I live in if I was "staying with friends" and had time to cook my own meals all the time.
The trick then is to pull this off without drowning in your own web of complexity.
Then again, it will probably just encourage me to open more and more tabs...
I know someone who was told mid-way through an interview, "I just talked with the CTO and he said we're not hiring until the end of the year."
His interviewer sheepishly apologized, and said on the way out, "maybe we'll get to see you in January" -- so who knows, maybe it wasn't total BS (or just dorky way of attempting to put a good spin on a piece of bad news for the candidate). But still, it boggles the mind that companies keep pulling stunts like this.
Reminds me of some of his early papers, in that sense.
No, but you should feel bad for thinking "it looks pretty" ==> "someone spent a lot of time making it look that way."
In particular, what you need to consider is: maybe they didn't spend all that much time on the visuals. Maybe they were either just really experienced, and it took next to no effort to get it to look that way... or maybe they had next to no knowledge, but used a framework to make it look as if they did.
I find this is a very common mistake managers make, BTW: assuming they can estimate, in the blink of an eye, how long it took to get a certain feature or behavior of an app into existence, out of nothing (and quite often, getting this estimate off by an order of magnitude in one direction or the other).
Hey guess what? If they can coerce you into carrying the devices, they can also threaten you with penalties -- ranging from marking you as "absent" or worse -- to deter you from shielding them.
But that said -- just trust your gut instincts here. There's a long history in mathematics of brilliant people going off into the dark for frighteningly long periods of time, and coming back with announcements of major results that turn out to be... interesting, but ultimately to contain irreparable gaps. And the fact that nobody -- not even people like Tao or Conrad -- seems to know what exactly he's talking about (even though they obviously respect the guy) doesn't sound too encouraging, either.
http://www.kurims.kyoto-u.ac.jp/~motizuki/top-english.html