microcentury

My last comment was in 2013. I'll see you again in 2031. I hope you'll continue to defend the flame of HN.

I'm sure that it is, and many people seem to do it. However, it's a lot easier to see smoking as it really is and be happy to walk away from it.

Have a look at the book or seminar - the enjoyment of cigaretts is dealt with at length and forms a core pillar of the argument. If you don't want to quit though, then you don't want to quit and nothing is going to make you open the book with an open mind.

For any smokers out there reading this and thinking, 'God I will never quit if I have to spend the rest of my life resisting the urge for a cigarette', like this article says, note that it doesn't have to be that way. I quit smoking six months ago and every day without cigarettes is a blessing. I _hated_ smoking, and I wanted to stop, and for years and years I couldn't stop. And then I did, and I am free, and it is wonderful. Why the hell would I want to go back to the thing that I hated and was killing me, like this person? If you see cigarettes for what they really are, as a non-smoker sees them, how could you ever want to smoke?

These arguments come from Allnn Carr's stop smoking methodology. You can read his book or do a seminar. And for those out there who say 'it doesn't work': I read that book the first time in 2003, and probably more than ten times since. I attended the seminar three times. It was finally the online seminar that made the ideas click for me. (The breakthrough was the realisation that the response that says 'I want a cigarette' is a broken thought process that was learned, i.e. is not natural, and can be unlearned.) Now that the ideas have clicked into place for me I am absolutely certain I will never smoke again. When I hear the 'I want a cigarette' thought, I don't have a melancholy response that I can't smoke. I hated smoking! I have a happy response that I have learned how to get back to very close to the state I was in before I ever smoked at all.

Anyway, I am sure this article is well-intentioned, but I would strongly strongly suggest that if you haven't tried Allan Carr's method you give it a shot, and if you have tried it, give it another try. Smoking is a nightmare from which we all can awake.

Also calling shenanigans. The sentence 'As a graduate student at Harvard she had become familiar with the Bing search engine's advanced capabilities' reeks of marketing.

Slightly off topic: Are there no male executives left in the world? All that politically admirable use of 'she' was linguistically very jarring, and an unnecessary distraction from a fine article. Have we not pretty much agreed on 'they' as being the gender-neutral acceptable alternative to 'he'?

This is slightly off topic, but I would just _love_ to know how Musk manages his time. He has the same number of hours as the rest of us - how does he divide them between his personal research and actually getting stuff done? What percentage does he spend on marketing versus engineering, PR versus logistics, and on and on... Man I would love to have a drink with that guy. There has been no other contemporary person in any sphere of human endeavour I have been so fan-boyish about.

-> Interesting. They put a Sales/Ops guy at the helm of Motorola, which implies that (in a way, naturally) all strategic decisions will be made by Google and passed down to the subsidiary.

This absolutely does not follow. Woodside is a senior trusted Google executive.

Edit: Removed absent-minded italics tags.

Really like it! Only feedback so far is 'Create report from template' is not intuitive to me. Would something like 'Enter today's data' work better, or is there an angle here I'm missing?

Affecting hangouts also for me (Ireland)

Fair point, noted and accepted :-)

She does sound like an incredible person, but what are we supposed to do with that information? Does it mean we should not try and do anything, given there is always someone out there who has a 'better' (for very wide definitions of 'better') story? I don't write this to be snarky, and I used to think in a similar way myself, but this is not a good way to see the world.

I would bet my house this is supposed to be a joke. It just falls slightly short of the mark in a way that's hard to define, and so looks like it might possibly be serious. It comes from the same school of humour that occasionally gets Irish people arrested by Homeland Security when they're asked if they have anything dangerous in their bags, and they roll their eyes and say 'Yeah, a bomb.'

Same thing here, also 2008, but with an Allied Irish Bank ATM in Dublin. The machine crashed as I was using it and permanently relieved me of my bank card, but the up side was that I got to watch the entire OS/2 Warp boot sequence play out.

The <reviews on Amazon for this book are not very positive:

http://www.amazon.com/product-reviews/1455516074/ref=cm_cr_d...

Anyone read it and care to comment?

Completely agreed on both points. The first line is so baffling I read it twice. Do they think programmers talk to each other in this mysterious 'code'? The writer of this article would be deeply disappointed by a glance at Code Academy.

It really is astonishing how much bile and vitriol can be caused by a UI change. I guess it's a subset of the general dislike of change most people have. And it's also amazing how absolutely certain some people are that their own view is the right one.

I'm not a fan of the new UI yet, but I suspect in a few weeks I will have forgotten what the old one was like.

But Google 'gives everything away' (with indirect monetisation), both the products that succeed and the products that fail. So in that sense this is just a list of failed products which are the byproduct of innovation at such a scale, rather than an indication of what has worked and what has not for Google in the past. Surely in this case, going up against a competitor that needs to charge, Google would be at a massive advantage (legality aside) by not having to charge?

If you find one I would be interested, as I've also searched for this without success.

The way things are right now, maybe this blows over and the AirBnB business model continues just the way it was, with its associated massive valuation. If they help everyone in the way you are suggesting, the model is _definitely_ finished, because you cannot create the expectation that AirBnB will pick up the pieces every time something goes wrong. And the more people use the service, the mores cases like this there will be. Also, AirBnB are almost certainly getting legal advice that says not to have any unnecessary communication with EJ in preparation for a law suit that looks to me like it's inevitable.

So your sentiments are admirable, but not practical. My heart goes out to that girl too, I have to say. She's clearly a sensitive soul, and this has really messed her up. I hope she can get over it and move on.

Wowwww that is an insensitive headline.

Edit: This comment generated more debate than I expected, and I should have made it a little more detailed in the first place. I didn't mean to start a discussion on the type of information appropriate to HN.

It hardly needs to be stated that more than one reaction is possible simultaneously, and we don't need to spend the rest of our lives lamenting the event. However I think the headline would be better if it acknowledged that people have been seriously injured, i.e. if it was something more like 'Oslo tragedy highlights absence of RTS information on Google'. The way it stands now it's like writing a headline on the evening of 9/11 talking about the heat resistance of concrete.

This is well written and fascinating but it's an intro, not an article. It's not ready for HN until it's all there, but when it's ready I look forward to reading it!

In fairness your HN headline exactly reflects the article headline, but the article headline does not reflect the article content, so I in no way meant it to be a criticism of the post :-)

So Google's biggest mistake was not taking on a giant merger, though mergers sometimes go horribly wrong, but sometimes they work out? Seems like the message in this article is a little mixed. Maybe someone other than the article writer wrote the headline.

This is an awful, awful headline. Entirely misleading.

The story that best illustrates Feynman for me is in Surely You're Joking Mr F (I think - it might be the sequel). On a trip to Japan he insists on going to an area where there is 'nothing to see' rather than the standard tour, and of course discovers a unique and unspoiled part of the country. But even if he hadn't, he would have considered it a win - in another of his stories, he talks about going to bars and waiting for something interesting to happen, knowing that much of the time nothing of note would occur. That drive to keep experiencing something new, and the understanding that the drive would often lead to nothing, is inspirational to me, and I think is what led Feyman to so many interesting things in so many fields.

The reality of a large corporation like Google is nowhere near as simple an engineer-vs-manager dichotomy as many of the comments on this thread would make it. Products need to be developed, but they need to be supported and sold too. Which of these functions is most important depends on your world view and your tolerance for angels-on-a-pinhead debate, but it's undoubted that each of them are crucial.

An engineering mindset of automation and solution-by-algorithm gives us the miserable customer service that Google is famous for; a realisation that people are tricky and messy gives us something more like Zappos. The people who are good at support and managing support teams are not like engineers, and the people running sales are an entirely different breed. Rare is it to find someone who can successfully manage all three. Indeed, I would go out on a limb and say - as an engineer myself - that it's easier to find a non-technical person who can make a positive impact in product development than it is to find an engineering who can significantly improve sales or support.

Vanity Fair interviews people it wants to be amazing, so it makes them look good; the author of a book about Zuckerburg is hardly likely to say he's not worth writing about; and the Social Network is a movie about the drama of the guy's life, not a business commentary. These are terrible sources to claim the guy has is 'overrated'. And he hasn't had anywhere near the time yet to show whether he's Bezos or Yang, as the writer points out, while at the same criticizing him for not doing the things great CEOs have done. Sheesh.

Off-topic: I despise this use of the word 'ask' more than I could ever fully explain, common as it is. It's a 'request'. Even for business speak, this one is a particularly brutal torturing of the language.

Other than that, very helpful article.

On your home page, 'every-day' should be 'every day'. (You only use the hyphen when it's a compound adjective, e.g. 'every-day event'.)

And actually, re the sentence 'Doing something, every-day, until you achieve it', you could remove all the commas and it would mean the same but read better.