yoak

I wonder if "boring" here just means "clear." I had a great case of this yesterday. We were reviewing a piece of code by someone that could have been better with a basic algorithm change. It did most of the right things but in the wrong order, sometimes on the wrong data, and did one major piece probabilistically were specific computation wasn't intractable.

The coder wasn't completely getting our explanation, but the code was so "boring" or "clear" that we opened up an editor, copy-and-pasted some blocks around added a few if statements and expected it to be basically functional. This was a complex algorithm and a complex change, and we offered provisos that we didn't know what that function returned so a "not" might have to go in front, and a variable name would have to be changed and one piece was going to have to operate on a new key in memcache, but it was basically there.

The point is, the code was so well-written that we could read it well enough to do this never having seen it moments before, and our resulting chopping was clearer to the original coder than 20 minutes of histrionics on a whiteboard full of formulae. That's how it should be. :-)

And for any haters in the crowd, it was all in Perl. So much for "write-only" complaints. :-)

It was great to see Paul make the very first connection that I made upon hearing the news. The deal had to be absolutely fantastic for the founders otherwise some portion of the best wouldn't take it. Having looked at the deal, it looks like it qualifies.

I agree with wave that it looks like something that should have worked so far, and one can presume they're getting better at what they're doing and hopefully will have a better economic environment for these current startups.

It's really cool that this happened.

I grew up in a steel town and the version of the story there involved whacking with a hammer.

Using American English throughout:

inflammable, flammable: http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=inflammable%2Cfla...

regardless, irregardless: http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=inflammable%2Cfla...

I agree with everything you say here. I only take issue with claims that Amazon was violating someone's right to free speech. I no more think people shouldn't boycott Amazon if their dislike of Amazon's decision makes them not want to use their service than I do that Amazon should provide hosting to someone if they don't regard it in their interest to do so.

Calling it a violation of free speech waters down the impact of the phrase as it covers real governments doing it with real violence. I went to college during during the height of the political correctness bubble and was exposed to nuts who called holding a door open for a woman "rape." I couldn't imagine any more crass or insensitive action with respect to real rape victims.

It doesn't violate someone's right to free speech or any other right for a company to fail to provide a service to them. A company having to provide service to some particular entity only violates one set of rights - those of the company.

My wife, suspecting that there is no such thing as inborn rather than developed talent, ran an experiment. She took something she was terrible at even after some fiddling -- drawing. She sucked at it. Her stick figures weren't very compelling.

She set out to learn how. Over the span of about two years with a lot of work she got to be amazing at it, and painting as well. She now all the time hears how she has such an amazing (previously undeveloped) talent.

I struggle with brevity. :-)

I've heard that called the "Spanish waiter" trick and seen it done with full plates. It's cool.

That was so well-drawn that I kept waiting for it to be funny but it never delivered.

Not at all! For the reason that google explained on the blog, it is a dumb response to remove or penalize this particular company in the wake of the media froth. The admirable and responsible thing to do is to figure out how to make the thing work better in general to cover the hundreds or thousands of similar cases not in the New York Times.

This issue is complex and I don't have great overall answers. It isn't clear how search results should bias based on sentiment. (That's discussed on the blog and here.) One thing I am sure of is that I respect discovering a result they consider bad and looking at the algorithms that caused the result and I don't respect deciding that you got egg on your face for the results of your algorithm in this case and jiggering the results.

Of course, we don't know that Bing didn't come up with algorithmic improvements, but the comment you're replying to isn't refuted in any way by the fact that the result has disappeared (or greatly diminished) in Bing. To the contrary, in addition to my bias to agree with the OP on Google / Bing, when one company says, "We've taken a look, made small improvements already that have some impact, and we're looking to make more" and the search result simply disappears in the other case, I'm inclined to take that as specific evidence of the former doing the better job.

The most common thing I see from such people is a desire to break off and do whatever is being done at their current company, but to do it right instead.

I heard he totally would have made it too, except no one would sign his NDAs.

I've rarely seen a code of ethics adequately specified such that it accomplishes its aims and can be followed. This is no exception. It seems well-intentioned. It seems that it would like me to be nice, be considerate, be honest, work hard and attempt to do good. I could agree with a statement like that previous sentence.

In an attempt to explain what it means, it comes up with things like:

Ensure that users and those who will be affected by a system have their needs clearly articulated during the assessment and design of requirements; later the system must be validated to meet requirements.

I don't write requirements of that sort, nor do validation testing in the sense implied. If I want to be in the ACM, this leaves me with the choice of either concluding, "Ah, I know what they mean and I'm there in spirit" or not participating. That sorta sucks. If I agree to a set of principles, I want to diligently follow it. I prefer a high-level "Don't be a jerk" approach to such things and sound human judgment entrusted to make calls if needed about propriety or identifying jerks.

Again and again we see people migrating from closed to open technologies, often despite initial strong advantages of the closed platform.

I wonder if the same thing could happen with innovative startup markets.

That's an excellent litmus test on whether there is likely to be anything actually valuable there. On the other hand, I wonder how much more traffic they might get from the people who visit just to affirm, "I do too know them..." :-)

As the other commenter pointed out, that's not my point. If I issue a billion shares and offer you stock options at a $0.10 strike price you can't really expect the company to grow that 25x . It's an entirely different matter if there are 50,000 shares.

You may be assuming that the strike price is fairly pegged at a real value of the company and thus you can make assumptions about real growth of the company in terms of multiple. Short of public markets, this is always a questionable assumption, but in the case of new startups it is almost completely arbitrary. When you start a new one, there is no reason to differentiate between choices in the number of shares varying by a factor of 10,000x or more, and strike prices are almost as flexible.

Perhaps the best reason to pick any number is to pick a large one because of the (irrational) psychological impact that your large absolute number of shares will have in option grants.

I suppose this emerges out of people's naive appreciation of public markets. Smaller companies often have stock prices in the teens. Mature, stable companies tend to hold prices closer to a hundred. Blockbusters like Google go to 400! Etc. These prices are managed with splits and have little to do with the return captured by owners of the stock, but people looking at it from the outside sometimes miss this. That's why I appreciated the article so much. It goes beyond these simple matters.

I really appreciate this article. Unimaginably, most programmers I interview to this day in late 2010, react primarily to number of shares an offer includes option to buy. I've written offers with (made up numbers) option to purchase 10,000 shares at a strike price of $0.10 and had candidates, asking no questions, attempt to negotiate for 20,000 shares which is something that they'd be more comfortable with.

In my admittedly limited experience, just realizing that there are a number of shares out there (fully diluted or not!) and that this grant translates to a percentage of the company and that the strike price implies a valuation is beyond a solid majority of people I've seen receive stock option grants. Articles like this one are certainly needed to improve education on these matters.

Re-reading that, I realize it could be read as my thinking that I believe all my ideas are "insanely good." What I meant is that I have many ideas that are compelling to me and seem insanely good... more than I could possibly execute on.

My problem is typically how to pick between all the insanely good ideas I have floating around.

I would say my number one rule is to pick something that is a deeply personal itch that I can scratch. It is hard to have as much motivation to tackle something because I think there might be a market for it as something that I really just want to have exist so I can use it.

I see this theme over and over again for businesses and organizations as well. One of my favorites, Good to Great talks about "Stop Doing" lists. Jack Welch pushed GE to end the businesses at which it couldn't be number 1 or 2.

In smaller organizations, it is worthwhile to occasionally take stock and realize the extraordinary number of things that you're doing that you have no idea why you do them. Most of those have no value.

It is awesome to see them being so consistent and publishing all of this. I've never seen a non-profit do so in such detail. Some of the comments here (particularly the stats) might be very welcome there, on the talk page or elsewhere. Presumably some at least will do that, and that makes them better able to learn and understand than similarly-sized and staffed organizations would be.

They're just awesome.

That looks like it could allow extending a practice common in only fairly new startups to more mature and larger organizations. I like the idea of people being able to find things that they want to work on and that they think are important, build teams around themselves and take action. Particularly at the beginning of projects, things work better that way if you've built the right team. Later, you tend to get more pressure from external drivers and end up resorting to "business owners" prioritizing backlogs or whatever applies to your implicit or explicit SDLC or methods.

At first blush, this looks like a way to extend that useful aspects of new teams further by increasing the bandwidth for tracking, communicating priorities and dynamically organizing without losing things. That's how it is different from bug trackers, etc., mentioned in the other comments. It would be interesting to use something like this in a project as mature as 37signals and see what happens.

I will look into it further if it becomes a product.

Most of the most talented won't have those credentials and, in my opinion unlike getting sample problems, being asked for the credentials is such a red flag that the best won't apply.

Everyone is talking like this is such a huge number. If it vests over four years (They mention vesting, but not period.) then it is roughly $900,000 per year. If typical is $150,000 , then we're asking how many people could possibly be worth six times that much? Maybe 10%?

Another way to look at it is that this looks small in comparison to early equity positions in startups that go on to work out. It sounds like a good way to combat a desire on an engineer's part to roll the dice on that.

Though I find little of value in the article, I like the title taken in isolation. Being passionate is key to success in my opinion. Advice to 'Be Passionate' implies that you aren't and can turn it on in some sense. This tends to cause people to act like they're passionate, and when it is pretentious, it is really obnoxious.

It's like working with people who carp about having "a sense of urgency." I always want to set them on fire. We'd then see a genuine sense of urgency. Most of what they actually do is just pestering people.

Yeah, the busy part of me has too many other things to do as well, but if you need someone to feed you dozens of other ways to use game theory to abuse people, it'd be worth it just for all the headdesk in seeing them implemented.

To do this right, you have to be able to change the terms of the auction. Allow bidding for the $1 to start at a penny so it seems like a good deal. Then allow that the highest bidder gets the dollar, but doesn't have to pay... and the second-highest bidder must pay his bid amount, but receives nothing.

You should see dollar bills purchased for hundreds of dollars at least.

"The only way to win is not to play the game." </wargames>

A bunch of engineers at idealab did this back during the bubble. The idea was the saturate Pasadena, CA with $2 bills, particularly as retailers, lacking anywhere to put $2 bills in registers, tended to quickly re-release them.

We tried buying them a thousand at a time from banks. One time a manager came out to talk to us about it and asked what we wanted them for. We explained and his response was, "So we're going to get them all back."