skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
While I haven't any book recommendations, I think one of the key things for delegation is to understand that you don't have to do everything. If you believe that you have to do everything because otherwise the work won't get done, then you either don't trust your team to be able to execute, or you want to be the "hero", neither of which are good things.

For more inexperienced delegates, you'll have to spend more time forming the task into something concrete for them to work with. However, over time you're building them up to be a productive member of the team that will need less and less instruction. I'm not sure a book can teach that, because I believe it's knowing your team, what they're capable of, and making the most out of their talents.

I'm assuming for this response that you have someone to delegate to. You also have "building my own team" as a discussion point, and I can't help there.
Has Ubuntu lost it?
His attitude played a major role in his ability to convince people. And it is way more time efficient to be rude sometimes, so he had more time to worry about important stuff.
Neither does "accountants and auditors" (60% of whom are women).
This is great. I see that the first reference made in the paper is to my joint paper in Nature arguing for release of source code. Even that seems like a radical step too far to some scientists, goodness knows what they'd think about this, but it's a great idea.
Been playing with frameless[1] which seems like a nice approach but I'm not really sure how to make it responsive. Anyone had some success?

[1] http://framelessgrid.com/
I know a designer who used to be a psychologist working with disabled children. He has a similar perspective: "it's design, not brain surgery!"
"Office politics" is a universally known behavior of most offices, and I suspect that maybe you were simply not paying attention to it if you don't think it exists.
I strongly believe now Linus' mother had an affair in Russia !

(Its only 100 or so kilometers to the border)

That kind of working environment: "I openly tell you when you do s--t but I do not hold grudge against you, it is for our mutual benefit" was common in Russian software companies around year 2000. This is largely a part of the culture.

It looks like a rudeness for an unprepared Western folks, but in fact it is not -- it is just unwillingness (or lack of proper training) to play games when one can do work instead.

I left Russia in 2003, and in the following years got adjusted my ways to be... nice.

I work from home in my pijamas too, so I wonder why Linus didn't catch that skill?..
A better comparison is "If you don't like your job, get another one." A few people will be poised to exercise such a strategy, most won't.
"It is easy to stop since only well-funded outfits can do it."

And you think depriving the government - particularly the department of defense - of tax dollars is "easy"?
This is a brilliant piece of writing by Linus. Love it. Rarely seen his points expressed that well.
Haha, agreed. I see two "dead" comments above you invisible to most people that are actually very valuable and pointing out that Finland where Linus started is not like America in regards to PC and honesty. I think HN is lessened by banning people who just have different or brutally honest opinions. They should save banning for spammers/trolls/people intentionally disrupting the discussion or lying, etc., but I see people ghosted all the time who are not that.
Android Stock Update: Why You Should Give It Up
Compared to the stuff he types into his keyboard it's still lame, and being cute and funny in comparison.

Also, stupid is relative anyway. Who isn't stupid? Is Linus actually that stupid that he thinks he isn't stupid? And if he is, what kind of weight does he think this insult carries out of his mouth? Stuff gets tricky real quick like that.
I lasted eight minutes watching the video. He just rambles about how screwed everything is and how right he is.
>you might as well make it easy for yourself and just go straight to the source.

I feel as if I'm not fully understanding you. Are you saying that because you expect your traffic to be read by a government agency, you might as well let any/everyone see your data?
I actually agree with him on the term "professionalism", and I've come out against the term "maturity" for the same reasons.

That said, Linus is a jerk. He says things that are aimed to hurt people. It's one thing to 'not think about it', or to not 'play into the game'. But he goes well beyond that, saying things that are mean and vitriolic. He can get away with it, he's a genius coder, yeah, all true. He's still a jerk.
I agree with your first statement totally, the difference is I would rate Linus' attitude, separate from his language, as unpleasant and unnecessarily aggressive. I don't like aggression in the workplace (or anywhere.) And I think that links into a comment above regarding women; in general women are less aggressive and so feel less at home in this industry. In general, in my opinion, etc, etc.
yes very cool...however more info would be good.
Lessons learned from a first 5 minutes pitch
You'd not take intelligence over ‘being pleasant’? I tend to enjoy the company of an intelligent asshole more than that of a ‘pleasant’ idiot any day.
That still won't necessarily stop collection.
Precisely; Microsoft succeeded because it freed up the average user from the priests in charge of the big iron.
If my boss was rude I'd wait up a bit to see if he'll last longer at his job than I could put up with. I wouldn't like him. I wouldn't do any favors for him. Boss is part of the job. If you don't like that part of the job you'll like the job less. If you like it little enough you overcome your inertia and leave job.

If my client was rude and I wasn't ok with him I'd stop responding to him. That's the beauty of freelancing. You don't have to work for people whoose behavior doesn't suit you.

In my opinion swearing doesn't make you a jerk but jerks don't get free pass. They offend some people and get less respect and cooperation from them. That's the social price. No law necessary.

Abuse at workplace is much wider subject. First thing is that there has to be relation of power. Linus has no power over people who he swears at. They can freely choose to never interact with Linus again at any point in time at no loss to themseves or their loved ones. Heck, they can even take all the stuff Linus did, copy it and work on that instead.
What I see in this brief (I haven't seen the actual talk) is an understandable fear to get out of the education system.

Let's face it, from kindergarden to the end of college, what we have is a set of "levels", a fixed path with very very few points where you can actually decide something. The natural step is to reach the next level and keep doing roughly the same. More tests, more lessons... etc

BUT, when that system ends, there is a void. The adult world is not "a fixed system" or "the next level in the game", but a whole chaos, full of options, opportunities, uncertainties. And that freedom can intimidate, specially if someone has been focusing in excelling in the educational system and has the perception (not necessarily that's a real thing) that none of that is useful, that other people already have links (which a lot of people will form) with this new and weird "life outside academia"

I mean, it's a great thing, but I can totally understand that it's scary at first.
Why Writers Should Kick That Amazon Addiction to the Door
There is HUGE difference between 'your code sucks' and 'you suck'.

I'd argue the former is more effective at addressing the problem at hand, while hearing the latter from someone you respect can be emotionally devastating for some people.
Research shows that you're not typical - most people find it massively demotivating.

There seems to be a thing here with a lot of people saying "I work like this and like it". That's fine but the worst mistake you can make with others is often assuming that everyone else is like you. a lot of management science is bullshit but alongside the nonsense there is actual quantitative research about how people behave and so on.

There is possibly a discussion to be had around whether programmers (or more strictly people with the potential to be good programmers as that's what you want to optimise for, rather than the people who are currently programmers) are typical but as a hypothesis I'd rather go with programmers behave broadly as other people do.
A "meta-story" is not a third type of story that you do. A "meta-story" or "meta-narrative" is a story told about a story. Remember One Thousand and One Nights?
Show HN: Updated Beautiful Docs with search and static page generation
When everything is standardized and trained with specificity, as our school system is, we are turning people into automatons. The trouble with automatons is they get automated.

We have been moving, for the past 50 years, into an era where there is still a staggering amount of work that needs to be done but there is no singular defined "job" to employ a person from their early 20s until their mid-60s retirement.
John Roberts appoints FISA Judges
I think is it has more to do with Human Interaction, or working as Remote.

When I dont see your face, listen to you directly, It is rather hard to understand the importance of something.
Especially when they are working on kernel, which is the most critical component.

Would Linus have said it loudly in front of hundreds of other Engineers? I would have properly called it verbal abuse. But in real life at least i can rise my voice and tone and shout without having to use a single abusive word.
He's correct about the cultural aspects. Many cultures value directness in criticism. Why should an open source community be bound by an American ideal of "correct behaviour"?
RMI - Remote Method Invocation in Java
Google Analytics Announces Content Experiments API
> isn't any form of criticism an insult?

Not if you go by the dictionary definitions. By what definition is any form of criticism an insult?
How many different varied offices and environments have you worked in?
Vendor management comes with a real cost (typically in terms of time).

This might be more contentious, but I believe that people that are still using Windows Server (and Microsoft offerings other than AD) are doing so because it's easier to use/more familiar than Linux/open-source alternatives: Throw Joe-Linux on Acme-Cloud-Provider and use Weekly-Flavor-Config-Management? Sounds hard. Click some buttons and fudge your way through group policy? Now we're talking something I can do to pay off a mortgage.
I feel the people defending Linus are being a tad hypocritical. I feel as though because you like Linus or Linux, his behavior is effectively being excused.

A thought experiment would be to replace "Linus" with someone you don't particularly care for and see if you don't wince just a bit.
And here we see the pitfalls of fuzzy thinking. There is all the difference between "that's a stupid idea" and "you're an idiot."
I'm pleased to see Google validating Myna's technology choice of multi-armed bandits ;-)
Speaking of his native tongue--based on my own experiences working with international colleagues, I think there's also a little bit of a cultural component to his behavior.

This obviously doesn't hold true for all individuals, but Americans tend to prefer the "Let's all hold hands and sing kumbaya" type of social dynamic. "If you don't have something nice to say, don't say anything." Much emphasis is placed on not hurting anyone's feelings, and maintaining the appearance that everyone likes everyone else.

Northern Europeans, meanwhile, tend to prefer the "We're all adults here, so let's cut the bullshit and say exactly what we think." Being honest and genuine is more important than being liked.

This part, I find really significant:
And hey, I don't actually think we've personally even had any problems. And I realize that you may react very strongly and get nervous about us having problems, but realistically, do you actually expect to like all the other kernel engineers? And equally importantly, not everybody has to like you, or necessarily think they have to be liked by you. OK?

That strikes me as a very Northern European view, that is not as likely to be shared by most Americans. It's just not how we're socialized in America. And too often, "professionalism" gets defined as "American style," while anything un-American is deemed unprofessional, which is not quite right.
But IIRC Linus did threaten the offending committer in the last rude email.
To the degree a flat design idiom such as Metro [or whatever it's called] begins to admit text and favor it over icons, a reasoned argument can be made that they are objectively better.

It is not just that the pictographic language of icons -, folders, floppy disks, file cabinets, trashcans, glue bottles, scissors, clipboards etc. - is drawn from a context largely irrelevant to large segments computer use today such mobile devices, educational contexts and home uses. Nor is it that elements such as the floppy disk are twenty years obsolescent.

The problem with the pictographic language rooted in skeuomorphism is that it lacks a grammar. It has no rules of combination. There is no icon for copy and paste - let alone one for copy from context a and paste in context b.

It is not entirely an accident that alphabets have been replacing pictograms for three millennia. They are more flexible. Likewise, the iconography of industrial buttons is rapidly disappearing both as a relevant context from the workplace, and as a human interface. Industrial interfaces are increasingly a screen and a keyboard [a keyboard is our industrial interface to an alphabet].

What is the most useful feature of the iOS interface? It would be hard to argue for anything other than the touch keyboard. It has two important features. Each icon represents a symbol rather than an action. Those symbols have rules of combination which allow the expression of complex abstractions.

Your roommate can text "Scrunchie on door." They don't need to download "The Let Someone Know You're Getting Laid App" from the app store. Neither do you.

The icon and skeuomorphism will continue to lose ground simply because they are too brittle for general purpose computing. There will be specialized contexts where they persist - just as pictograms are a useful way to describe the way the Grants Mill Road winds over the hill. The sign before two successive turns shows two successive turns.

Today, we are in a future where Grants Mill Road has been straitened as it heads down toward the bridge, but some interface designer has not only retained the sign but had it painted to simulate a brushed aluminum finish and shading to simulate an embossed surface illuminated from the upper right.

Most skeuomorphism is cutting two inches off the potroast.

http://mikeschinkel.com/blog/conventionalwisdomassumptionsan...
Why ARM and JavaScript based smartphones/tablets suck
From what I have seen of Linus in interviews and presentations he seems like a very fun and pleasant person. He is harsh and swears when he gets angry which does not mean he cannot also be pleasant.
Linus gets away with it because he's Linus and people are willing to swim through a river of shit to work closely with him.

Conversely, an average OSS developer will drive people away with this attitude unless the benefit of working with him is so attractive that it outweighs the pain of abuse (in which case he's probably not 'average' at all).

Assholes who really deliver get a pass from (some of) the world. Doesn't mean that you can get their results by being an asshole.
ui design progresses similar to fashion, with escapes and refutations from the immediate popularized trends of itself, in order to bring back one of the forgotten previous trends. but each new trend indeed contains both the immediate and far pasts.

flat ui design appears to replace skeuomorphism, but it is indeed a skeuomorphism of the early computer interfaces instead of a blunt skeuomorphism of earlier non-computing objects.
'thinking' was clear hyperbole. Treat it more like 'seriously planning the idea' than 'the idea existed in their mind whatsoever'.
All design is arbitrary, sure, but I think the current trend is to embrace the underlying primitives graphics cards give us, rather than hiding and deforming them into real world objects. These primitives are absolutely arbitrary, but I think think is where the idea of 'digital authenticity' comes from - being true to the hardware.
Linus is a brilliant asshat.
Of course! I wanted to know the micro-controller used :)

Looks like gilgoomesh has a direct link to the creator's actual youtube account as well, not the embedded rip-off from youtube user chrill22, which looks like a typical view farmer. It looks like chrill22 took hinamitetu's "Quadruple Backflip(NO.16)" video, trimmed out the part where hinamitetu was setting the robot up, and then re-upped it. Absolutely infuriating.

And judging by bradleyjoyce, it looks like there's more technical info to be found, albeit in a language I don't understand.
>The doodlers did not all become artists, many were just bored or uninterested.

In fact, the doodlers were likely attending to the lecture, e.g. http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1882127,00.ht...
Linus is not your boss.
Nobody is forcing you to contribute to the kernel. If you want to, he's the "benevolent dictator". If you don't agree, "fork it and go your own way" as someone else said.

It may look like masochism, but people who work with a "benevolent dictator" know what they are in for. We don't need to be "protected" and if you don't like it, just don't come, the same way I'm not going to play with soccer players because I don't play soccer.
I can never remember. I thought it was North Korea but lately I heard it was somewhere in Africa. I only know the US is one of two places and the other isn't part of the developed world so it's not the best company to be keeping.
What's especially damning is that there are no specifics. It amounts to an unsupported assertion to the sales people that they are not selling the inferior product. I have yet to see any of the "lot of different third party appliances."
How the C++ Compiler Decides to Move Objects
If you haven't already, go replace your firmware with OpenWRT:

http://wiki.openwrt.org/toh/start#asus

It's a much better UI experience, performs better, and with better stability than most OEM firmwares, and it's open source so you can inspect/recompile the code as needed to satiate your security concerns, install arbitrary software, etc.

This is literally the first thing I do with every router I pull out of the box.

Unfortunately, ASUS's devices tend to use the Broadcom 47xx series chipsets in general, which tend to be not as well supported as newer chipset like the Atheros 7k and 9k variants, which are in most of the recommended devices these days.
8 Cloud Computing Skills High In Demand Right Now
There is a happy medium :) But in general, I'd always choose (true, sincerely meant) pleasantness and kindness over intelligence. Though, if a kernel developer is required, then maybe intelligence is the more useful, giving rise to this current situation...
I do not think managing an open-source project is so different than running a company.

> Linus doesn't run a business. He's the kernel admin

He's also the original author. And he still is an awesome developer and the Linux kernel is not his only accomplishment. Git is another one. Linus is one of those people that can change the face of our industry over night and he has done so at least twice.

Not only that, but if you read his trail of angry emails, one thing is for sure - he's also one of those people in the open-source community that care deeply about users. Many of his rants are about changes in the kernel that break the userland. This is not so different than a business owner caring for his customers.

> I want to get his opinion on managing code not managing people. He doesn't deal with payroll, 401ks, employee vacations or benefits, he doesn't care about retention, he cares about code

That's an odd statement to make. A business owner cares about revenue, not payrolls, 401ks, employee's vacations or benefits - those are just things that a business owner must do to secure the company's revenue.

Also, you're wrong, because Linus's job and greatest skill is in managing people. If it were about "the code", Linux the kernel would have taken a back seat to 386BSD.
> There's something refreshingly blunt and urgent about the 2nd case.

In this scenario Stephen has been hired to write code/produce something, I'll go all-Marxist on this and say he was hired to produce plus-value. He was not hired to be sworn at, no matter how good or bad his code/work might be, and this is why swearing directly at people is unprofessional.

As an aside, I'm surprised at the people who say that swearing to other people's face is "manly" (or something of the sorts). In the part of the world that I live if you swear someone directly in the face you'd better be prepared for a physical fight or worse.
This is the death of complete Microsoft dominance, not the company. Cloud email represents a relatively small portion (25-30%) of the total enterprise market, and Microsoft owns the on-premise market.

Google is maturing as an enterprise vendor, and the simplicity of the licensing model and lack of client side software is appealing to the "new economy" companies: small businesses, businesses using Macs/BYOD and businesses using lots of freelancers/temps.

For the traditional enterprise shops, Google can be a real pain. You need to buy 3rd party stuff for things like identity federation, for example.

At the end of the day, it's called competition, and it's great. Instead of Ballmer & Co. coming down off the mountain and letting us know what we're going to do for the next 5 years, we have a real marketplace and can say no.
Exactly. Friendly communities attract more people. Linus gets away with it because there's tons of people who want to work on his projects, and he can afford to alienate some talent. Others don't have that luxury.

I've heard of plenty of people who prefer one language over another because of the nicer community. Eventually that should mean that projects with friendly communities are more successful.
Great essay. But I'm surprised PG didn't mention Pretotyping. Here's the Pretotyping PDF that hammers the point: make sure you are building the right IT before you actually build IT:

https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B0QztbuDlKs_ZTk2M2RhZWItYzk3...
If you're interested in the Geometric Modelling part of sculpting, Freestyle is a good starting paper - http://liris.cnrs.fr/Documents/Liris-5391.pdf
The future of Linux: Evolving everywhere
I've got TomatoUSB on my Asus router. EXCEPTIONALLY powerful and stable firmware with great wireless coverage. This past weekend, pardon my humblebrag, I was able to segregate my network into separate VLANs for the home LAN, guest wireless, and a DMZ for my servers, with appropriate access ACLs (via iptables) for each. I feel very secure with this firmware, far moreso than with the Asus stock one that's for sure!
Pivotal HD Community & Pivotal HD Single Node (VM) Available for Download Today
Actually, I do get to tell Linus what is or isn't professional...and so do you and everyone else. It's called "opinion".

Also, while I admire what he's done, let's lay off the hyperbole for a bit. "..one of the most important human endeavours of the last hundred years"? Really? That's laying it on a bit thick there. But hey, you're entitled to your opinion too.
Sure, but it's a public forum. Only a naive person has any expectation of long-term anonymity.
I rather like the taste of Red Bull - and thinking about I just realised why. It tastes like Creamola Foam!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creamola_Foam
Google’s China Head Steps Down