h3h

From another post on their structure[1]

Only a minority of board members are allowed to hold financial stakes in the partnership at one time. Furthermore, only board members without such stakes can vote on decisions where the interests of limited partners and OpenAI Nonprofit’s mission may conflict—including any decisions about making payouts to investors and employees.

So given the latest statement from the board emphasizing their mission, it could be that Brockman and Sutskever were not able to participate in the board decision to fire Altman, making it a 3-to-2 or 4-to-1 vote against Altman.

[1] https://openai.com/blog/openai-lp

The entire urban core of Austin, Round Rock and Cedar Park are tolerant and generally cosmopolitan, save for the East Side (east of I-35), which has a larger Hispanic demographic and tends toward religiosity and traditional social roles. West of Austin for 20-30 miles, though, are wealthy (and mostly liberal) suburbs that aren't going to give any trouble.

That's a long way of saying that, based on my second-hand experience, gay men don't run into trouble in and around Austin or its immediate suburbs.

I don't agree with Aaron Swartz on very much, but we agree on hiring practices:

http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/hiring

The title is from Paul Ford (the author) himself, on Twitter: http://twitter.com/ftrain/status/69952439767404544

Austin, Texas / On-site only / Gowalla Incorporated

A fun company with interesting problems, stellar designers and an unrelenting focus on great user experience. We're looking for an iOS developer, Ruby developers, an operations engineer and a BlackBerry developer.

I moved to Austin last year to join Gowalla and I love both.

http://gowalla.com/jobs

I should hope that we're not all waiting with bated breath for the White House to endorse every bill that substantially alters the structure of government.

There seems to be a recurrent theme of social marginalization when reporting on software and especially open source. Specifically, opening this article with the fact that the guy "lives with his parents" immediately sets him up as an eccentric, dysfunctional person in the eyes of the typical Western reader.

Is this just a reflection of the culture and bias that NYTimes journalists have, or (more sinisterly) are there official guidelines for spin on these types of stories?

Thiel is still an extreme pessimist with regard to the future and this seems to be his attempt at embracing the views of his intellectual opponents by running the "Optimistic Thought Experiment", which he nonetheless disclaims with "Unlike more rigorous forms of scientific investigation, there are no empirical means to falsify these mental exercises. The optimistic thought experiment exists largely in the mind. The vistas of the mind are not always the same as reality."

Fair enough, Thiel, but aren't your doomsayer projections also a direct form of thought experiment, based on extrapolation just the same?

He goes on to outline what he thinks are three defining markets (or distortions thereof) that could utterly define the future ("China", "Internet" and "hedge funds"), and claims that the markets are woefully out of alignment with reality. I think we have to take his view with a large grain of salt here, considering his bias: he's a global macro hedge fund manager who also invests in Internet startups.

I think he's probably right about a lot of the distortion and possibly right about some of the importance of these markets, but he doesn't even mention any other possible contenders (energy industry transformation? nanotech? biotech? government competition?). I think it's a mistake to assume that any one or three factors will determine the mid-term future when there are literally trillions of factors in play. Then the logical conclusion is that we can't really know or predict anything about the mid-term future, which may be largely right, but I think there is possibility to predict with narrow foci, like "What will happen in transistor design?" or "What will happen in nuclear reactor design?"; though those too will always be hampered by revolutions that we never see coming.

Overall, I hope Thiel is wrong about a lot for the reasons that he so adeptly explains: there's not much else to hope for if the alternative to what you want is total destruction and nonexistence.

Make your HTML output lowercase. It's the predominant style these days.

Also agreed that drawing divs from scratch (no image upload) could be useful.

Causes - http://exchange.causes.com/jobs/ - San Francisco (on-site only)

Hiring generalist engineers to work with Ruby/Rails and build something that makes a tangible difference in the lives of the less fortunate.

The puzzle has been added back again, as a bonus.

I did indeed remove it. We use it to filter the masses on Craiglist, but I find it less compelling for the jobs page itself.

Though considering this audience maybe I should have left it in.

I wouldn't recommend skipping college if you can get in and either afford it or are willing to incur the debt. Even after $25K+ of debt and 5 years of undergrad for two degrees, I don't regret it.

If I had to do it all over again, I think I would have angled very hard for a Symbolic Systems degree from Stanford (http://symsys.stanford.edu/). It's a very cool cross-disciplinary program and, if you can afford it (mentally, financially), you can cram in more CS classes or whatever strikes your fancy along the way.

Causes is hiring software engineers & sysadmins in Berkeley (soon to be SF): http://exchange.causes.com/jobs/

25MM+ active users, Ruby, distributed databases. Lots of scaling challenges.

Oh yeah, and it's all to raise money and awareness for charity. You know, saving the world. But actually instead of kinda.

A necessary component of mass production is consistency. Like it or not, Rails has reached the masses of web developers and enforces its constraints and conventions to facilitate the production of new web applications. I empathize greatly with DHH when he talks about large apps and the need for conventions. The truth is that most web developers will never devote as much attention to URLs as some people think they should. Full stop.

With that in mind, stable conventions are of paramount importance if Rails is going to maintain its practicality when building large web applications. On the spectrum of poor conventions to good ones, Rails has been much closer to the idealistic end of pushing REST principles and the concept of resources over haphazard URLs and actions. We owe a debt to Rails and its designers for the abundance of REST in production today.

That said, I empathize infinitely with Adrian Holovaty. I love URLs and I want them to always be beautiful everywhere. It's true that Rails gives less obvious control over URLs than Django or Sinatra, but it does so for the reasons mentioned above. There are probably small changes that could be made to make Rails more URL-aware for those of us who would like to craft every URL with loving adoration, but those changes absolutely must be compatible with the consistency already embodied in the Rails routing system. I haven't thought much about what those changes might look like, but I agree with DHH that the post above feels very hand-wavy in the proposal department.

Just remember that we URLophiles are a minority. Rails must work well for the majority and they will never care about URLs.

I like it.

Feature Request: Allow it to run invisibly (no Dock or menubar icon).

Or you just don't get wasted and make an ass of yourself if you don't want people to think that you sometimes get wasted and make an ass of yourself.

John Resig has posted a eulogy: http://ejohn.org/blog/eulogy-to-_why/

It totally satisfies my compulsive need for correctness.

For pedantry's sake, this sounds like enabling wealth rather than creating it. The wealth doesn't originate with the law, so isn't created by it.

A corollary to the move toward smallness, if I might:

http://h3h.net/2008/12/economy-of-software-maintenance/

Excellent response. It perfectly distills the difference between Paul's claims and DHH's (and my) perspective.

I think the "rock star" mantra used to work well when everyone else had dental job postings and a standard application form that had to be faxed in. Now, though, marketing and recruiting people are clued in on the "ninja" and "rock star" terminology, so abuse it to no end.

I too am turned off by these titles for this reason. When I'm recruiting I just go for what seems honest and appealing -- nothing overly flashy or trendy, but not boring either. I think the best positions combined with the best companies will always stand out in some way, but that way will probably continue to change.

Amazing.

This is one of the most thoughtful and apparently correct essays I've read in a long time.

Awesome.

Great read, but the biggest things that stop me from starting a startup aren't really on your list.

It's a combination of factors, including (1) need for savings and planning for the [non-startup-rich] future, (2) supporting a girlfriend who refuses to live a grad student lifestyle, (3) expensive cost of living in the area I want to live.

I fully realize that most of those sound like excuses more than reasons, but there is definitely a huge chasm between investing money for retirement, buying decent furniture, being able to pay rent and utility bills, etc.; and throwing caution to the wind for a probable failure and extremely strenuous social, economic and physical ordeal.

So I think my answer to why more people don't start startups is rather simple: it's not easy to leap that chasm into poverty, seclusion and exhaustion for a glint of a chance at huge success.

Of course I'll continue hacking on my side projects and hoping my equity in the startup I'm working for affords me the opportunity to take a risk of my own in the near future.