skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Unfortunately I work for a big company, and our team has a ridiculous 150+ designers/developers - how anything gets done is beyond me.

Also unfortunately, it fell upon me to review as much of the code produced as possible for some time. It wasn't a horrible job, but it opened my eyes just how beginner some of these developers seemed, and to how useful code reviews can be.

I never attempted to organise tradition 'sit-down' reviews - it wouldn't have been a good use of peoples time (and 90% of the team are in india!) - I just checked out a particular module and scanned it for red flags, repeated code and attempted to build up an understanding of what it was supposed to do.

Doing that caught many design flaws and simplified many chunks of spaghetti code, not to mention abuse of the database (bad queries, unnecessary queries etc) etc, so I think it was a good use of time.

Catching design flaws at this post implementation review stage is not really productive however, as its too expensive to fix them.

My solution to that was to do white board sessions with the designers, then ask someone to write up the outcome in a couple of pages to be quickly reviewed by the other members at that meeting - doing that was essential, as the number of times miss-understandings were caught before a code editor was even opened was amazing!

So basically, I think that code reviews have their place, but my feeling is that a sit down meeting is generally overkill. I also reckon that they are much more important (perhaps exponentially so) in a large team with many potential mediocre programmers than in a startup with several much more competent hackers!

I have never tried pair programming, but I know a lot of people are fans of it - I can see how it would be useful in a big corporation when someone is implementing someone else's vision, but struggle to see how it would work in a small startup. In the startup, surely people would be trying things and molding the vision in ones head until something useful comes out? I certainly hope to give it a try someday to see how it goes ...
THe BART police in SF suggest you not wear white earphones because it might get you robbed. This implies that there's still quite a bit of status associated w/ iPods and iPhones.
James Cameron did a visually breathtaking, 3D take at the end of his "Aliens of the Deep" about a hypothetical alien civilization living in Titan's oceans. Presumably, they were getting their energy from the thermal vents on the ocean floor.
Does it have to imply status, or simply that it's easy to sell them quickly on craigslist? I'm not saying an iPod or iPhone isn't the best solution for many people, just that I don't really think of them as conferring status in the same way that, say, a cell (car) phone did 10 years ago, or a Ferrari does today.
I am also a 27 year old programmer working for a very large company well over 10K employees. Unfortunately, doing well career wise is more about politics than programming.

I have never worked for a small company so I cannot comment on that, but I hope for sure that there is something better than what I have experienced so far! Just have to pull my finger out and get out of there, or start some sort of startup ...
If you are buying a straightforward diamond solitaire ring, go for it. blue nile, ebay, whatever.

But if you have something particular in mind, suck it up, go to a jeweler and pay full price. But haggle. Don't pay sticker.
Bruce Schneier: Inside the Twisted Mind of the Security Professional
You could try a cool method of random inspection. Have a daemon that listens for submissions to your tree. With a random chance (you determine probability) have it email the contextual diff (maybe even highlighted full diff) and the changelist description to a random developer.
Larry Page, Jimbo Wales, and Richard Branson conspire from private island
Woo, you sound just like me. I recall a conversation in the canteen with a colleague recently where I said something along the lines of "... this place is so mediocre ... there has to be something better ..." and she replied with "well its just a job, you have to work somewhere, there are plenty of places worse".

She has clearly decided to settle!

I also agree with the less ambitious people doing well - I liken it to Seth Godin's book The Dip - those people are willing to lean into the organisation and just settle for its way. The more ambitious can sometimes see just how wrong things are and lean against it, hence doing badly in the company. If you are going to do well in a big corporation, you have to learn to play by its rules and settle unfortunately ... I haven't done that yet, but its a daily struggle!
The diamond market is proof that women do not, in fact, want respect.
I haven't read this yet but I know its a damn good essay just by the title.
I'm 26 and just passed my fifth year at a very large company (18000+), with four years in IT and the past year in Software Engineering. I've been looking for an oppurtunity at a smaller company, since my current one is stifling my ability to learn and be productive.

The issue I'm finding is that small companies are typically looking for someone with more experience than I could currently offer. Has anyone else come across this issue? It seems to me (and others where I work) that we have to somehow pay our dues and get experience at a large company before we gather enough experience to become valuable assets to smaller companies.
One of the things that drove me to leave Deutsche Bank was that I had much less choice in who I got to work with. This is actually a big deal. By and large, in a startup you choose who you work with (either by hiring them, or being picky about which startup to join). In a big company, you have no real say.

And it can be a real bummer not to work with dynamic, ambitious people.
maybe they should talk to myspace or facebook about trying to monetize. $1 gifts!
why would it be? the joy of being on hacker news is the amazing amount of feedback you can get.

and based on our analysis, http://searchyc.com/askyc, tons of people are still asking interesting questions.
Bridgewater Associates is a large (~400 employees, $36 billion assets) hedge fund that tries to avoid hierarchy:

http://www.bwater.com/home/philosophy.aspx

"Conflict in the pursuit of excellence is a terrific thing and is strongly encouraged, in fact demanded. There should be no (or as little as possible) hierarchy. Certainly there are organizational "superior-subordinate" relationships; however, every "subordinate" is encouraged to argue with his or her "superior" if he or she thinks they know the better way, and every "superior" is required to encourage this."
This was pretty specific:

"companies who make widgets for Facebook are not worth anything close to $500,000,000."
mike wants to remake newspaper into 2.0 to compete against cnet. sounds nifty.
Are you talking about shared hosting packages? I think judging a language or framework based on the shared hosting packages available is probably one of the less effective arguments...
Ask YC: How to find a hacker
How do you find a hacker who wants co-found a company with a "business" person (think: biz dev, ppt, excel) who has a prototype and business plan?
Being an MVC framework doesn't mean it's a rails clone, just that they have similarities.

And, I choose to use the PHP5 fork of CI, Kohana -- http://kohanaphp.com
It may not be as bad a mistake as you think. There's some experimental (if unintuitive) evidence that rewarding individual contributions in organizations is harmful, even to that individual's motivation. The extrinsic motivation extinguishes the individual's intrinsic motivation.

Many high achievers have an attitude of "achievement for the sake of achievement." Individual rewards crush that spirit.

Joel Spolsky wrote about it on more than one occasion. Here's one link: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/08/09.html
The Conversation Has Left the Blogosphere
I think of it more like this: a programming language's features are like its genetic code. A dog is not a "bad" cat, it is just a dog. Nothing more, nothing less. A cat is badly suited for some dog-like tasks (dogsled racing), while a dog is likewise badly suited for some cat-like tasks (hairball production).

However, there are some ways in which a dog can be badly designed. It can be prone to cancer or congenital diseases. It may be blind from birth. Such things are not features of dogs, but rather extrinsic properties, just as the ones listed in the article.

Or, to put it simply: it is not what you do, but how you do it.
When does it end? If I went, I would fly over from Chicago for the afternoon/evening, so I have to know.
"That might be worth exploring. I suspect there are already some highly partitionable businesses that lean this way. But I don't know any technology companies that have done it."

I believe Gore-Tex may work this way
What's wrong with Wikipedia
Asking as a Substitute for Thinking
Page Six Shutters Web Site After Three Months
YouTube Co-Founder Starts Venture Capital Firm
> producing fresh vegetables doesn't [scale]

The reason starchy and hydrogenated foods dominate is agricultural subsidies, not so much natural economies. If you killed corn and soy subsidies a whole lot of junk food would disappear. Fritos are only cheaper than sauerkraut because you paid part of the frito bill when you filed taxes. Healthy fresh vegetables are most definitely mass produced.

Running with the metaphor any way, government has a major role in perpetuating huge corporations and preventing the emergence of smaller ones. SarbOx is an obvious example. OSHA makes it very hard for a small group of guys to set up a manufacturing shop, even if they know how to make it safe. Read this guy on how it's basically illegal for him to run a small, traditional farm:
http://www.mindfully.org/Farm/2003/Everything-Is-Illegal1esp...
If you're worried about distractions, just make them wear a burka.
When I started reading this I thought it was going to suck. I thought he'd rant on big companies employees and make startup founders seem cool because of his background. When I was about half way through it started to change; what Paul said really made a lot of sense.

I want to be a researcher, but I also want to make somewhat of a living before getting a masters degree and stuff; so I can be completely independent. I thought joining a big company would be a good start because it would pay me good, I would be able to learn stuff and they could even help me out with my masters degree.

What hadn't hit me up until now is that, by doing that, I wasn't getting closer to my goal to be independent. I would just switch from the parent tree to the company tree; different pressures, but the same dependence. I start to think now that in order to be independent, to have the freedom of doing what pleases you most, you have to start your own company. You have to be your own means of survival. That's getting into the wild and finally living in a democracy.

I'm disgressing a little now, but it's because of this thing someone told me once. He made me realise that we actually live in a dictatorship most of the time. Your parents tell you what to do, then your boss tells you what to do; and you have very little say. In order to feel more like your opinions matter and that you can actually do something about the world, I guess you have to have the freedom to be able to say what you want, to code what you want, etc.

So, in the end, I was surprised. Very good article, as Paul usually writes.
My dad has a microwave that I simply cannot figure out how to operate, period. Last time I spent about 10 minutes trying.
In the context of "The people who come to us from big companies often seem kind of conservative." --- how do founders coming out of academia fair? Specifically, founders with, at least, a few years towards a phd.
"I can imagine for larger groups to avoid tree structure would be to have no structure: to have each group actually be independent, and to work together the way components of a market economy do. (...) But I don't know any technology companies that have done it."

I was thinking about this part and I realize Y Combinator doesn't look too different from that.
its just the trend nowadays......
It's not about what the company does now. It's about what they're going to do in the future. Tons of profitable companies have humble beginnings.

So really there's not much to discuss here without more information.
Bash.org for /bin/bash
He was sued by the SEC in 2003 for making false claims about his product (among other things). Considering he has been working on it for 40 years, it's probably all a scheme to relieve investors of their money.
One route you could take would be to look for a startup with young founders. They won't insist on experience, because they don't have it themselves.

Another would be just to look for a good startup. All a good startup cares about is how good you are, not how many years it took you to get that way.
Google Releases Language Translation API
I wouldn't say the modern firm is directly a product of modern technology. The Roman army had the same tree structure. It's more that modern technology makes it possible to produce things on a very large scale, and that means it pays to have companies with thousands of employees, even though they are individually only a fraction as productive as they might be.
What specifically did the programmers in the cafe say or do to lead you to believe that there was "something odd about them"? Perhaps you remember one or two details that actually got you thinking about this.
Money buys happiness -- if you spend on someone else
Put an octo-core mac Pro with 4 30" monitors out on the sidewalk with a large net hanging overhead. When the hacker goes to grab the mac, release the net and ensnare him.

Once captured, keep out of direct sunlight (the monitors will provide all the illumination necessary), feed pizza, caffeine and stock options.

Best places to go hunting: Palo Alto, San Fran, Cambridge.
One very serious problem with that idea. Team X isn't insulated from lawsuits that Team Y gets hit with (or contracts that have the potential for massive costs, for that matter).

Suppose Team X isn't doing well. Probability of getting fired is 50%. They decide (independently) to do Z, with a 90% chance of increasing their team's profits (and not getting fired) as well as a 10% chance of major lawsuit that will crush the company.

This nearly doubles Team X's survival probability, while exposing the company to a massive risk. This is a classical example of agency costs. And this is why big companies are usually pyramid shaped.
Making millions when the boss isn't looking
A submarine http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html ?
I agree with your last thought, but let me just point out that there is absolutely nothing humble about the kinds of companies in question. It's explosive growth built upon ephemera.
Photos: Flying car readies for takeoff in New York
I don't disagree with the sentiment there's a small thing that I think is slightly incorrect.

Baboons, particularly Hamadryas Baboons, can be found in troops ranging from 5 to 250 animals (although a troop of 400 has been reported). These troops have a very strict hierarchy with about 4 "levels": a harem - containing one male "follower" and up to ten females, two to three harems unite repeatedly to form a clan, and two to four clans form a band.

Very large hierarchies do and can work in the wild, although they are rare or last a limited period of time.
Amazon's new API automates fulfillment of shipments
I don't disagree, but at the same time, it does take an eye to be able to spot a good idea. If you look at Karim's LinkedIn profile (http://www.linkedin.com/in/jawedkarim), he worked at IPO and then helped to found YouTube--two not so bad bets (though I don't know if he got anything above his salary at PayPal). That said, if you assume that he's worked at only these two companies, he's already batting .1000.

A typical VC will make 10 investments for his portfolio of which 7 or 8 will go under, two may return 3-5x ROI, and one _may_ be big (but very unlikely it'll be the next Google). Since Karim is starting a VC firm, you could argue he's going into it with a better track record than most VC's, and the fact that he's played an active operational role in two companies matters quite a bit when it comes to evaluating deals. I'm not saying he's going to kill all the other VC's out there, but if he's got the dosh ($), why /not/ start a VC firm--espescially if that's his passion?!
Why do we have to compare programmers with wild animals?
Unquestionably, and yet interesting.
I think it's fair to look at language features as benefits and drawbacks in languages, as long as you're aware of what those features have to offer, and what the costs are.

It makes sense to want a way to judge languages not on the presence or absence of particular features, but on their ability to achieve some goal. But what should the goal be? Popularity? Lowest time required to write programs, or to read them? Approachability for new users, or convenience for experts? Utility for writing fast programs, or for writing programs fast?

You can specialize languages down to the point where there's a different best answer for every possible goal, but because I don't want to maintain fluency in 50 different languages, I'm most interested in languages that do very well in a wide variety of ways. If you want to get down to figuring out where the trade-offs really are, and which goals can be achieved simultaneously, you can't take the attitude that every language is just great at being itself. You have to allow for the possibility that some languages really would be better all around with the addition or alteration of certain features.
Peter Thiel: How to Invest in the Singularity [Video]
The identity color reminds me of a recent incident with my bicycle. Somebody chained his bicycle in front of my bicycle, effectively pinning it to the lamp post. After a while I tried asking the police for help, but they were unable to help me, because they would have needed proof that I own the bicycle. Having the keys to the lock (a chain) was no good, because I could have added the chain after the original owner pinned it to the lamp post.
Even better than that toaster, when I tried to reinstall my wireless driver on Windows a while back (since then, I have seen the light and switched to Ubuntu), the new driver wouldn't install because a few files were missing. "Please click here for help [online]."

I kid you not.
the conversation has left this posting :)
There model's not a bad one. Most analysts predictions is that in social networking, two things will happen:

A) There will be a couple of massive players (Myspace, Facebook, etc.)

B) There will be a ton of niche players--you already see this with sites that cater specifically to pet lovers (http://www.petcrash.com/, http://fuzzster.com), expectant fathers (http://www.brandnewdad.com), etc.

Andreessen is betting (probably correctly) that people will be much more interested in using a service like Ning than going out and building their own social networking site from scratch. He can monitize on targeted ads and value-added features, and it seems like B (above) is in fact not only happening, but working well!

Ning passes 200,000 social networks
http://blog.pmarca.com/2008/03/ning-passes-200.html

Some interesting elements:

- "We're experiencing 0.5%+ day-over-day growth of number of networks on Ning, which means that we're adding more than 1,000 new networks per day -- and that's accelerating."

- "Over 70% of the networks on Ning are active, as defined by 'used in the last 30 days'"
Make a living on software sales by ignoring pirates
Ha! They all traveled there either by private jet or giant cruise ship. :)

I get that they're thinking bigger picture but honestly...
Trying to commercialize university technology is a sucker trap
A MindMap of Python [Flash]
See also: http://freemind.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Mind_Map_Gallery#Python
One reason why a recession is a good time to start a company: Because the well-funded riff-raff drops out sooner.
New Instruments of Surveillance and Social Control: Brain Hacking
The rise of the Middle Web
Demo Day: "The first thing that struck me was the quality of the crowd."
Couldn't agree more. In a company of any size getting a product costing over $100 or so is going to attract attention of middle managers who will put a stop to it.

I think the 37 Signals blog (or at least someone on my blogroll) mentioned that was a target of their software - cheap enough that a product evangelist can convince his or her boss to try it out without an entire tendering process ... You just can't compete with Borland's salespeople :-s
Locate startup mentors with "informational interviews"
"Work for another company if you want to, but only for a small one..."

My first job out of school was at IBM. This was invaluable not because I learned a lot but because I witnessed firsthand the bureaucratic inertia described in the article.

When I left to launch a startup, I never looked back or second-guessed myself because I knew I wasn't missing anything.
How to get work done on vacations
Yeah, variable naming standards are nice for consistency and I take it "common functions" is a euphemism for "don't cut and paste," but do you really want to dictate 'how to do iteration' in a way that's more limiting than the implementation language's idioms?
Have not the last 50,000 years of evolution primarily been of social structures and culture?

Consequently, is being 'wild' necessarily a positive attribute?

Doesn't this (and comparisons to animals) to some degree reflect de-evolution?
Final words from Arthur C. Clarke
At 63, Israeli immigrant solves 38-year-old math riddle
I had a microwave once that only had one nob that you turned and that was it. I've never seen another setup that was that simple and effective on a microwave.
Verizon is the devil. My only solace is that somehow Father Google has protected us.
How to protect your brand before you release your final product
Does anyone know if you can only use their US warehouses or Europe / Germany is also available?
/Agreed.
Ah, but startup founders living in the US can still rely on the US Army to protect them from invasions.
New tool automates your semantic web SEO
Venture Hacks Branches Out From Blogging, Launches Recommendations System
I own this game, and it totally rocks. The lack of DRM should make everyone buy it just to support this great idea.
My generation doesn’t know how to be thrifty
Looking back at a computing icon
Man, this makes my blood pressure go up. Wonder if Charter will block this site like they did with "Rate My Cop".
See also:

A) Punished by Rewards (Alfie Kohn)

B) Herzberg's Motivation-Hygiene Theory (Two Factor Theory). The idea is that a very low salary can lead to dissatisfaction, but increasing the salary beyond the required minimum isn't one of the things that increases happiness. Link: http://www.netmba.com/mgmt/ob/motivation/herzberg/
It seems like all decent xml suites are in the few to several hundred dollar range...

Unfortunate because I just needed a small subset of their functionality ( a wysiwyg xslt editor )
Well worth a listen!
Ah yes, the old "attribute everything to the guy who just died" routine. A classic. I'm sure nobody else would have thought of geostationary satellites. Oh wait, that's right, someone else did, and Clarke just put them in a book 17 years later.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geostationary_satellite#History
Cozy for insiders can be good too!

In which case, I suggest posting a fake decoy event on Upcoming to draw away all "the Web 2.0 party hoppers". Put it at 111 Minna.
Frugality in practice: using the public library
I would suggest not working when you're on vacation.

There's a reason it's called vacation, and if you relax and have fun you'll get much more done when you get back.
This is now one of my favorites. Could not agree more. You sum up very well my reasons for leaving IBM to do a startup.

I keep trying to give my friends who're still there and working for other companies this message. They don't get it.
Getting Recommended