alpeb

Hello, author here, happy to answer any questions!

Thought experiment. If we assume that "alien intelligence is here" in some form like UFO sightings, why not also assume they are on the internet?

Bingo. AMA.

Yep, but the other way around. Open source was Microsoft's fiercest enemy, and now it's managed to root deep inside the company, eating it from the inside out, turning Microsoft into something very very different than what it was 15 years ago. We won!

Ask at the onset whether or not people would pay for the product you intend to develop. This is the Willingness-to-Pay talk,” Ramanujam argues. “Frontloading this question is powerful because customers won’t be in the mindset of negotiating price. Instead, they’ll give you objective feedback that you can use to prioritize what you’re building.

Nah. People aren't objective about their purchasing decisions like that. The only way to find about willingness to pay is through actual experimentation.

Tech leadership is extremely hard. You either get at one extreme the MBA trained to think producing sugared beverages is equivalent to producing software, and at the other the formerly great coder that couldn't metamorphose himself to be able to manage people. Having all the required qualities is extremely rare.

Please don't refer to those as "movies". They're really documentaries, just like Terminator et al.

I fully agree, unlike many others that are voting down this and other criticisms. The amount of boiler plate that go-kit adds is crazy.

It's still, also by many indexes, one of the safest countries in the world, despite the objectively isolated issues you see in the media... Unless you come from another top OECD, coming back doesn't sound like a great deal.

Following that reasoning we could say everything is a continuum, and that wouldn't be a useful observation.

Considering there's a shortage of labour supply in this industry, if you're good enough, at some point it is you who is screening candidate companies you'd like to work with and not the other around. And just as it's hard for companies to find the right candidates, it's hard for you to really tell how work is gonna be like with any given company. Things like ageism, culture-fit crap, ping-pong tables benefits (instead of better pay) are all great hints that give away places you don't wanna work in. Not just because those things are bad by themselves, but also they reveal a lack of moral principles that's gonna be reflected later on in the job in many other ways.

I just want an web-based email client that allows me to filter out emails that are not from my contacts. AFAIK gmail can't do that. I hope this does.

Very French for them to require a masters degree for employees. Contrast that to the more welcoming working permit in Germany[1]. Also currently the startup scene in Berlin looks pretty interesting!

[1]http://www.bluecard-eu.de/eu-blue-card-germany/work-permit.h...

That's nice, thanks!

The separation of concerns inherent to microservices is such a great advantage, that in my opinion it's critical even for small teams. You can bring an extra hand into the team without them having to have to understand other parts of the code to do their job. A monolith with clearly delimited packages will give you this too, but it won't allow you for example to place each service under its own repo which would also provide you with the ability to limit code access. That requires a lot more up-front investment, but it's worth over the long run, unless your project has a very limited life-span, which is rare and sometimes really unknown.

Because whenever they go low you should always stay high.

Given the popularity of frivolous media, ain't most people just frivolous consumers?

The Blub Paradox argument basically states that you must use the most powerful language because it's the only one that'll let you have a broader perspective to judge all the other programming languages. Ironically, this kind of perspective is very narrow itself. You gotta consider the ultimate goal of writing software is to generate solutions that successfully solve users' problems. For complex problems that require lots of people working together, usually the effectiveness of that collaboration is the hardest of all problems, well above the technical problems. Most of all modern programming languages can solve all the problems, in different ways. So the criteria for selecting a language is not power, but how it facilitates existing and new members of a team to make progress.

So true. Unfortunately bullshitting ability usually correlates to success.

The finance industry is indeed one of the top scourges of humanity. Hopefully decentralised money à la bitcoin would some day replace it.

You're opening a whole new world for me. I'm one of those that thought one could only meditate given the perfect quiet setting, and so used to do it only sparingly, now even less after I got married and have a kid. So I'm gonna give it a try and be more contemplative during boring chores. Do you happen to like some online resource dealing with this?

Also have Jony Ive read it in your mind.

I work with Scala remotely, and we're hiring! (send me a PM).

DO is VPS, so there's not the slightest chance for tenants in the same machine to see or modify stuff from other tenants (besides attacks through the network); also you have a guarantee on the amount of CPU and memory allotted to you. The best kind of shared hosting only relies on unix user permissions for security and that's not enough, plus you don't get the CPU and memory guarantees VPS offers.

Love the concept and the site. Minor gripe though, that I also find in most job boards: searching for Scala also gets me all the entries with the word "scalable" in them :-(

Good old web hosting is not good at all. Please please never ever use shared web hosting for anything. As soon as your site gets a little bit popular you're almost guaranteed it's gonna get hacked.

"Eventually you’ll reach a point, where you can’t quite bring yourself to follow through on step five [Decline the offer]. The position isn’t exactly what you were looking for but it feels so right, you can’t let it go. Then you’re done."

In Colombia there really is no war. Farc and friends are armed groups fuelled by the drug trafficking business and population oppression, lurking in the most remote parts of Colombia where there is no presence of the state. So basically they are just thugs, but very well organised. If they really were an insurgency, had some kind of political agenda and vouched for some part of the population, then we could talk about a war, against a party with some legitimacy. Not the case here. There is no case of negotiating against a group that has nothing to bring to the table, and on the contrary it creates a very bad precedent. Were the plebiscite had succeeded today, the other armed group here, ELN, would have no incentive to stop its current mischievings knowing it also had a guaranteed agreement in the future with full pardon for them.

Very relevant given than this year's Nobel peace prize will most likely gonna be awarded to one of the biggest mass murderers in Colombia's history, alias Timochenko, or perhaps maybe awarded to the country as a whole for the current "peace" process, that is nothing more than an appeasement circus.

It seems to me Berlin's startup ecosystem is heavily optimized for very young people. It's awesome the immigration process is so easy, but the minimum wage requirement for IT jobs is just 38,688 EUR. Lots of companies sponsoring visas, but with wages rarely above 50k EUR, even with a relatively low cost of living, they're only attracting young singles willing to sacrifice in order to get a blue card. And from the job pages videos I've seen (like Zalando), they explicitly state they're looking for young talent, and of course the ping-pong table propaganda (love that term!) is pretty standard.

With Chrome OS now supporting Android apps, this obviously means Chrome Apps will get dropped there as well even if they deny it now. A real shame since since those had a chance to become an excellent modern platform for internet-first desktop-grade apps. As all things Google, they had a great solid technical start, but at some point the clueless managers had to pull the plug.