blu3jack

Even better: for years Barnes & Noble bought out the contract of every location that Borders tried to open in NYC, and opened a B&N there for the exact same reason -- and also to keep Borders out of NYC. In the rest of the country they did the open-across-the-street trick whenever possible.

Of course, Borders went on to screw the pooch all by itself later, but that's a different story.

Agreed. Totally awesome cellist. Fantastic use of looping to create 16-32 part cello pieces live, on stage, as a one woman show. And yes, she's hot, in a way that's at once kind of manly and very feminine. I don't know quite how to describe it.

Which some tinpot dictator might just try to do.

I think the interviewee made a very solid case that there is a hiring gap in the area of experienced specialists. He seemed to think that was the major chunk of the "skill gap" employers complain of.

I have seen that.

On the other hand, he described an army of job-hungry young people striving to get the right education for entry level work... but missing the boat on just the right tech -- again for overly-constrained hiring processes. That does not match my experience: I see students coming out of the educational system -- reputable universities -- with a huge gap in fundamental knowledge.

I fear that universities, colleges, and vocational schools, in their effort to deliver workers with fashionable resumes, are failing to deliver the fundamentals.

Yes, you can teach yourself the fundamentals if you know you need them. But if you've gone through 4-6 years of university under the theory that they are teaching you what you need to know, it may be harder to realize that, in fact, you have learned how to look good, but not how to be good.

Ironically, it was "rethinking digg" and "rebuilding it from scratch" that killed it in the first place.

I have seen this product in operation, and I can definitively say that the way to increase your influence score is to post lolcat pictures.

Sure, and some jobs I had more influence and others I had less. But at the end of the day, it's not your baby. You don't have to live with consequences, and you don't get to. I eventually went back to a full time day job. Yes, I miss the opportunity to take a month or three off; I will probably bounce back to the freelance life at some point; but right now I have the satisfaction of working really hard as the true owner of a product.

The other path here is starting your own company, owning your own product. But if what you love about the freelance life is bountiful free time, that is not the path for you!

It's a big topic. To the author's point, the role of free time changes a bit once you have been able to plan your free time over a period of years rather than months. It takes on a very different rhythm.

Beyond that, probably the biggest single evolution was in my relationship to the work itself. In the early months and years I loved being able to go heads down on a project without ever worrying about the politics of the project or the organization: I was there to get the thing done. However, I am the kind of guy who cares about his work. Eventually I found this same experience to be dissatisfying. I felt that I was abandoning my children into a hostile corporate world with no one to look after them.

Moreover, as a freelancer you have much less influence over the product and the process. You're a hired gun. Sure, you can do a great job and collect a good paycheck, but if you love what you do it can be frustrating to have extremely limited input into decisions outside the scope of your contract.

Back to the author's very excellent point, I also found the management of benefits and finances to go from a source of engagement to just another hassle. When you are setting up your system, it's fun. When you are executing it, and occasionally screwing it up (taxes!), it's just another headache.

Yeah, of course. I wasn't shocked that they could find my name, only that they would -- that doesn't happen in steerage.

Zynga's games have become a short-hand for immoral game design. I understand why some people don't like the games, but I'm sad to see this go into popular culture as a truism. It's cheap, it's sloppy, and it's ignorant.

The reality of any game design, Zynga's in particular, is far richer and more nuanced than this meme credits. Specifically, the author makes two sloppy errors:

1. Gamification is used to make something addictive. -- It is a game, it is not gamification. And the goal is to make it fun. Sure, you can call fun addictive if you want to make it sound less... fun. (Now if you applied game mechanics to things that were not games, that would be gamification.)

2. And in turn to part people with their money. Actually, most of any social game's "tricks" are intended to increase the popularity of the game. To spread that game to as many players as possible. Giving people a way to spend money on what is otherwise a completely free game is a separate enterprise entirely.

You can call any of these things immoral, I suppose, but it's not the easy conversation the author wants to have in support of "ennobling", "enriching", and "advancing."

I flew first class the other day. I don't usually. I found myself startled -- and not pleasantly so -- when the flight attended used my name when asking whether I might like something to drink.

Would love to hear the follow up after a couple of years. I did freelancing for six years & the benefits and drawbacks both become a lot more starkly drawn -- & somewhat different -- over time.

I'm less security paranoid; I would be content with universally accessable/syncable cloud storage at a reasonable price that simply worked and wasn't tied to some particular corporate entity's efforts to monopolize some market or another.

I think there's something else interesting here in the relationship between engineering managers and project managers. The author writes: "It's been undone by a continuing erosion of responsibility accorded to managers."

We have introduced specialists of various sorts, with varying titles: project manager, program manager, product manager, technical project manager. The introduction of non-managerial technical-track engineering leadership roles for those smart engineers who either can't or won't be good managers has further splintered off the value-add of the engineering manager.

In between team leads and C-staff there are N levels of people who's job has been highly eroded and who struggle hard to add value to their teams.

I am really interested to see where this is going.

I think the author understands the depth of this acceptance of Agile when he writes:

'Today they’re surrounded a vast army of scrum-masters and evangelists, recycling (competently, mostly) the same insights, and an even larger crowd performing half-assed renditions of steps learned by rote: “Yeah, we do agile. We have a standup every day.” Many of these renditions have the professionalism, but not the passion, of a small-town talent show.'

Which may be my favorite bit in the article.

When I've done it, I've done it as a status log at the bottom of the README, or in a separate file in the project. But I think your level of detail is just right: it doesn't look ridiculously time consuming, and yet it captures the real content & momentum of the project.

I'm not quite sure what the point of this blog post is. I guess it's to re-start his blog, and restarting a blog often lacks a good hook, and may be heavy on the backstory. Hopefully this is a starting point, not a destination.

Call me cynical, but I wonder (A) what is the real motivation behind this, & (B) how seriously is this campaign going to be pursued in unfriendly terrain?

I suppose the Singapore test will be interesting as it is some homosexual acts are technically illegal but not generally enforced. Sounds like a good candidate for an easy win... but if it's ineffective there it will presumably be ineffective everywhere.

I like it. I have done some things like this in the past, but not in as much detail as yours. Very inspiring!

Seems ok. Not sure it's the "answer" to making sense of a codebase, but it's certainly addresses part of the problem. Why do you number your files, e.g. 003parse.cc?

Thanks for the link, that's pretty interesting. Do you use a modification of this now, or have you simply codified that approach internally and commit intuitively?

Perhaps, although most examples of literate programming that I have run into tend to be so verbose as to be equally daunting and off-putting in a completely different way. Another great topic: the art of the comment!

And a great way to procrastinate from tackling the next leg of the project is to blog about it, post a link to that blog on hacker news, and then obsessively watch yourself bounce around the hacker news front page on a slow Saturday afternoon.

Welcome to the debased state of science journalism. Anyone with half a brain should feel completely insulted by this b.s.

It sounds too public. What if I would prefer to date without everyone in the world knowing everything about me & my dating life???

The opposite is true: it was penny-foolish and pound-wise. As Glenn pointed out -- the door desks were an expensive and ergonomicaly unsound symbol that told a true story about frugality and the relationship between the company and the employee. Because of the omnipresent symbol of frugality, many cost saving decisions were made that undoubtedly paid for the cost of the door desks many times over.

The less happy side of the symbol: that amazon really didn't care about employees was reinforced in other ways as well. A common refrain from Jeff: if you're not happy here, leave. Life is too short to be unhappy.

In some senses that's a bold answer, and an honest one. But note that the answer was very, very rarely: what can we do to make life better here?

The door desks were also a symbol to us all that if you wanted to work at a place that cared about your health, well-being, and happiness, you might very well want to move on.

But, to be fair, three counterbalancing factors held people there: hard engineering problems, the very real prospect of wealth, and working on a product that was very, very successful. I never heard Bezos give anyone the sugar water speech: he didn't have to. It was obvious that Amazon was changing the world.