TheLarch

That is an interesting thought! I wonder if he did undertake some risk. I just emailed him, as I never properly thanked him. Maybe if he emails back I'll ask.

Also he negotiated a year off of our traditional 5-year vesting (at the time anyway) in the salt mine that is Microsoft, though he was never to take a position there himself.

I see no end to liquidity event horror stories. I'm so lucky.

I was so naive when I joined my first startup. When we were purchased, it came to light that the main guy never got around to signing my stock option agreement. He is a fucking mensch and signed it after the fact.

Character buys a unique, abiding respect.

"The problem with Perl is that it tends to be a different language for every programmer."

Exactly. Larry Wall cited an analogy somewhere: if you want to know where to put walkways on a new campus, wait until pedestrians have worn trails into the grass and pave there. Perl docs repeatedly makes jokes along the lines of, "it does what you want, unless you want consistency. Bottom line, Perl was designed without predictability and consistency in mind. This makes it blazingly fast for development by one person, but the administrative overhead between multiple programmers balloons.

Because of a natural inclination to reduce the number of characters one uses, as you get comfortable with Perl you start taking more and more shortcuts. A singular moment in my long career occurred when I opened some old Perl code after leaving the language for a time. I stared for a long moment, dumbfounded. It was as if an alien had visited my computer and overwritten my code with what Wall has affectionately described as "line noise."

Also, I was awed by the feature set in Perl 6. I don't think any language outside of Lisp, C, and Smalltalk has had such profoundly new ideas. Pronouns in Perl 5 are still unique to my knowledge after 20+ years. Wall is wildly imaginative.

Perl is what made me realize, in the mid-90's, that OO is largely just a marketing term. A sufficiently powerful language provides whatever portions of OO you need a la carte.

"I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times." --Bruce Lee

I am not sure if this submission is tongue in cheek or not.

Fiske's Cognitive Miser theory: "The theory suggests that humans, valuing their mental processing resources, find different ways to save time and effort when negotiating the social world." (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_miser) Such an indictment that this "science" can debate these topics with a straight face.

As Feynman said: "We've learned from experience that the truth will come out. Other experimenters will repeat your experiment and find out whether you were wrong or right. Nature's phenomena will agree or they'll disagree with your theory. And, although you may gain some temporary fame and excitement, you will not gain a good reputation as a scientist if you haven't tried to be very careful in this kind of work. And it's this type of integrity, this kind of care not to fool yourself, that is missing to a large extent in much of the research in cargo cult science."

From Wikipedia: "Her four most well-known contributions to the field of psychology are the stereotype content model, ambivalent sexism theory, the continuum model of impression formation, and the power-as-control theory."

"Recently, Fiske has been involved in the field of social cognitive neuroscience. This emerging field examines how neural systems are involved in social processes, such as person perception. Fiske's own work has examined neural systems involved in stereotyping, intergroup hostility, and impression formation."

Neural systems.

2015 R&D: $806,648,000 2015 Sales, General and Admin $1,132,164,000

I can't imagine a justification for these numbers. Twitter seems like a small company idea.

I presume you speak Russian then? If so did you learn anything about the quotation? I Googled it just now and found... this page.

The best jokes defy explanation to some degree. A good example: the de facto definition of 'chutzpah' is, "To kill your parents and then ask the judge for clemency because you're an orphan." Not only is it funny, it's also the best available definition.

Experience proves that food critic is a legitimate job, and sure there's economic value in restaurant review. However in my utopia it would be a low-key affair. Zeal for watching men play a game or eating seems debased to me.

The remark about "my body is not my own" seemed unduly melodramatic.

(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3d053pPV_AA)

The humor of oppressed Soviets, particularly Soviet Jews, is perhaps the best I have read.

This may be more modern, but one that I love is, "Once you've been in the military, the circus isn't funny anymore."

I feel gratified that you mentioned this. Bulgakov's "Master and Margarita" obsesses about apartments. I suppose this is because financial opportunities were otherwise constrained. In this story at least cheating seems to have been the norm.

"The domesticated foxes had floppier, drooping ears, which are found in other domestic animals such as dogs, cats, pigs, horses and goats."

I happened to recall the Origin of Species mentioning this: "Not a single domestic animal can be named which has not in some country drooping ears."

To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, fashion is so ugly it has to be replaced every six months. Though the Metropolitan Museum may be my favorite place on earth, I find a good portion of NYC to be repugnant. Nowhere have I seen such spineless obedience to trends and fashions. Many residents seemingly can't put on a tee shirt without worrying over it endlessly, and express a self-congratulatory air when they've gotten that tee shirt just right. They are delighted to wait for 1.5 hours to get a burrito because it's the right burrito, and the right line to be in to buy one.

Hearing this guy say "my body is not my own" made me twitch and I had to stop.

The difference between them and rabid football fans is a matter of degree, not quality.

"No one can really come up with any stories about his life that don't make him sound like a total dick so they cut the testimonial part short" killed me.

This is a good read. https://www.amazon.com/Extraordinary-Popular-Delusions-Charl.... Market participants often do know there's a bubble. However, if your neighbor keeps making more and more money selling tulips (that was a thing), then you will be tempted to buy some tulips yourself, knowing full well that you are commanding an absurd price.

Bubbles can be more "musical chairs" than rational pricing.

Please see my last comment, this is a debated topic.

However, I've read Mike Milken and, despite his warts, I believe he did radically improve capital allocation. So it certainly has happened over the years. -- edit: I meant about Mike Milken

I grant that Google is more of a social good than Facebook.

Your claim that Goldman has contributed is a debated topic. Paul Krugman favorably mentioned a study that purports to demonstrate that Wall Street's endeavors are largely unproductive. I can't find it now unfortunately.

Besides introducing systematic risk, the sale of this software by Goldman smells fishy. Despite the Blankfein quote about maybe selling for $5 billion back in the day, if the software is what they purport it to be, wouldn't selling it be akin to Amazon licensing their product distribution to Walmart?

I've wondered what these million dollar per month programmers do on Wall Street. This really puts it in perspective.

On that note, it's completely depressing to see many of the best minds of our time working on shit software that adds nothing to society. Another swath of them are working on getting people to click on ads for Facebook and Google.

The US experiment with alcohol prohibition is an ominous precedent to the war on drugs. Prohibition caused organized crime in the US to flourish. When Prohibition was repealed, the machinery was in place, so it refocused on drugs, gambling, and extortion. So the war on drugs is a second wave effect, and we are responding in exactly the same way.

Clarence Darrow, in his autobiography, discusses his defense for Loeb and Leopold. L&L were wealthy Chicago teenagers who read Nietzsche and decided they were Ubermensch. They murdered a random boy to prove they could get away with it. Darrow argued that L&L would not consider murder again, and that their crime was something that would happen only once in 1,000 years.

I found this repugnant. Who more deserves prison than those two? But with reflection my views have softened. At least one of the two seems to have wanted to be good. He lived out his life in prison quietly, spending his time writing an ornithology book. I can no longer honestly say I believe that society as a whole was better served by jailing them. Perhaps they should have been given the chance to redeem themselves by becoming productive citizens, and the chance to earn back a measure of dignity. (Certainly repeat offenders should be deemed a menace and incarcerated for the public good.)

I feel the same confusion about Brock Turner, the Stanford swimmer who raped a woman behind a dumpster. There was a lot of outrage at his early release, but again I'm not sure the greater good is served by keeping him behind bars. I hope he will live in infamy for the rest of his days, as is just. But should he have stayed behind bars for longer, at the public expense? I can't give a really cogent reason why he should (I am not comparing his sentence to that of other rapists, or to that of other convicts by the way).

Mobster Whitey Bulger of the Winter Hill Gang did in fact do this in Massachusetts in the early nineties. The papers reported it at face value, I guess for fear of libel suits.

"In 2002, at an event held to celebrate the Times's 20th anniversary, Moon said: 'The Washington Times is responsible to let the American people know about God' and 'The Washington Times will become the instrument in spreading the truth about God to the world.'" [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Washington_Times]

I found this article disappointing because there's no advancement of a thesis or journalistic investigation. The author could have tracked down any number of illuminating statistics: number of wing suits sold over time; BASE/wing suit deaths over time; number of live videos posted over time. As the piece lacks either of these, it's almost pointless and thus the author attempts to tie it together with a question, just as you often see in college essays. There's no honest attempt to answer the question. So it's neither an essay nor investigative journalism. It's Reader's Digest. The article cashes in on prurient interest in death without paying anything back.

(To be clear this is an interesting topic to me. I followed Dean Potter for years, back from when he first made his name for slacklining and climbing.)

"Driving at 70 MPH versus biking at 12 MPH is a ludicrous point of comparison. If you're traveling at 70 MPH, you're almost certainly driving somewhere that you couldn't realistically bike. Driving 4 hours to a family gathering is reasonable in a way that biking 20 hours on the highway is not. ... The risk numbers are only appealing because of this absurd conflation."

I am not sure that I disagree with you overall, but I believe you are too dismissive here. Obviously, implicit in the piece is the notion that you must arrange your life to a degree to make bicycling possible, as the car is vastly more flexible. I think the better question is, having done so, how to compare the risk? It's not an easy question. MMM's answer is admittedly somewhat glib, but you're not allowing room for a fair comparison either.

"cars work fine"

Global warming, congestion, obesity epidemic, and arguably peak oil. Also: http://www.roadswerenotbuiltforcars.com/

I agree that many downtowns such as those of Las Vegas, Houston, and Atlanta simply are not bikable.

This is inevitable as venture capital assumes a larger portion of the economy. However, I have never seen such a focus on reputation as I have in the startup/venture capital world.

A good portion of what you might call 'blue chip' VC's value reputation highly. I may have the details wrong here, but between stints at Twitter Jack Dorsey tried his hand at another startup, failed, and felt so bad about it he repaid his VC's out of personal funds. Ron Conway made an offer on the spot to fund his next venture, whatever it might be.

My perception is that YCombinator is like that as well, and that word will get around quickly if you act like a jerk.

Joel Spolsky of Fog Creek talks at some length about avoiding jerks even if they are productive programmers.

Investment has always, always attracted jerks, so there is nothing surprising here. It's unfortunate that the article does not mention the rare rejection of apparatchik-ism and the self-serving and jerks in general that does happen in VC.

"not because it makes sense (a lot of the time it doesn't) but because there are no consequences"

But it does make sense a lot of the time. The lack of consequences is a contributing factor for this.

Car 'ownership' of the roads is debatable: http://www.roadswerenotbuiltforcars.com/

Well done! I am mostly referring to the 'bracket' kernel thread processes, which were not there back in the day. I must admit some laziness here, as I could research these in just a few minutes.

I avoid Gnome and KDE for that reason: they involve too many processes.

I generally avoid busy roads, but when I am at a light I do enter the center of the lane. This is because one of the most common accidents that cyclists suffer is the "right hook" where a right-turning car does not see you. I accelerate hard in that case and don't ever get the feeling I'm hassling anyone much.

I appreciate what seems to be a sincere sentiment, but at the same time I don't feel like it's my place to point out to a stranger that her, say, sedentary lifestyle or drinking habit is a health risk.