rabble

I'm pretty sure the contemporary word we use for "female impersonators" is trans.

If an org does WBI's then it's a good indication that they are not choosing the best applicants. Instead of either getting good at them or trying to get the industry to change, we should embrace this.

If they do WBI's then they probably do lots of other things which run counter to best practices. Isn't it so much better to expose to the outside world a culture of cargo culting inability to evaluate techniques for the efficacy.

There are so many orgs who do run themselves well. The real tricky party is how to determine that quickly. With WBI's we can get a short cut.

Long Live The White Board Interview!

Twitter started out as Odeo, we started with Ev's investment in Noah Glass's idea for a podcasting platform in 2004. After a few months in early 2005 Ev joined full time. Biz and Jack joined in the fall of 2005 almost a year in to the company. Twitter itself was created as a prototype in Feb 2006, and the current version was launched as a side project in March 2006.

Companies name co-founders based on what's useful going forward and of the dozen or so folks who were at Odeo when twitter was created it made most sense to name Ev, Jack, and Biz as cofounders. Goldman probably turned down the offer to be named as a cofounder, and the rest of us weren't given an option. Later Hatching Twitter came out and Noah was added to the list of founders.

Starting companies is hard, running them is hard, the drama of who said and did what is interesting but it doesn't teach us much about why the platform ended up like it did or provide insights in to creating new companies.

Yeah, huge amounts of work from prototype to world changing platform happened after i left. Nobody created twitter, rather it was the collective work of many.

I know a lot of the early history, I worked there when we hired both Jack and Biz. I can tell you that it's a really good thing that Biz is back on board. Biz was able to articulate what twitter was as the human voice of the company in both directions. From day one the question was always, what does Biz do.

Biz bounced around but when he was there things were better. Kind of like the basketball player that Nate Silver likes to love, who doesn't have any stat which makes them star, but everybody else around them plays better when they're there. Biz isn't a business guy, nor product, nor code, nor support, nor really marketing. But when he's in the room, working with people, everybody's better at all of those things.

He can play a kind of court jester role, which is disarming, but he's super damned sharp. He uses stories and humor to bring people forward.

Having him there, working on twitter means there are now two people in senior roles who aren't afraid of breaking twitter, because they created it in the first place.

In recent years, talking to twitter employees you get this amnesia over the company's culture and history. People don't know where things came from, they don't know the story of how the came to be. The myth's are complicated and messy. And eventually go so messy the company stopped telling the story of how twitter came to be where it is now all together.

With Biz back, he can take on that internal story telling, creating a hero's journey that the company can believe in. Because he's there, as an equal to Jack in understanding the origin, he can tear things down without fear of destroying somebody else's house of cards.

So i think it's partially values and markets. Enough US companies know the transformational effect tech can have on a business where that's not really understood elsewhere. Just having part of the market get it means it drives up all prices. In the US you are quoted a price before taxes, many countries quote offers post taxes (including after income tax is taken out). That can make US salaries look MUCH higher. Because the employer doesn't think about taxes, if you're outside the US as a contractor or freelancing, you can get a much better deal.

one in a billion... he's the most ethical hacker and political actor i've encountered...

They only use it for fixed line systems, not cell phones or microwave. Those are the ways people actually want to get connected in rural areas.

If you can get line of sight, microwave works well.

I've got a place in rural northern california and we don't get cell phone coverage, no where within a 20 miles, and of course there is no broadband. The forest service doesn't help put in towers, the rural telephony program only supports landlines, which don't reach out here. Easy process of putting up both cell phone towers and microwave repeaters would be huge. What's now is that the government makes it very hard to do, but it should subsidize it instead.

I love Project FI, but nobody who tries to call me ever gets through. Not nobody, but really like %75 of the calls don't go through. The data and international roaming are wonderful.

Does gigster have anything real at all? There are no gigs at all listed on their site... just a few full time jobs in SF, plus things for working on gigster itself. Seems like it might be a lean startup trick of painting the sky blue to try and build both sides of a marketplace.

Not only is it cool to honor David Kelly, it's also probably more useful to have a speed limit like 17 vs 15. The thinking is that 15 feels generic where as 17 is specific.

It's really disappointing that they didn't even look at 500 startups, one of the few VC's who've done a genuinely good job at getting diversity of partners. http://500.co/team/

The question is will these folks ever get brought before law enforcement for such a brazen attempt to infiltrate networks?

I got to try this out at XOXO and it worked remakrably well. Really enjoyable to use and i didn't get motion sick.

Seems cool, but it's missing a lot of listings. Compare the city's listing of permits at protlandmaps.com and buildzoom and you see lots of missing ones from BZ. It does have a nice UI and seems cool. Oh also you have to implement the zillow style grouping otherwise folks won't even zoom in enough to see the data you do have.

Because Ev's a great product guy but not such a great manager. Speaking of which, Jack's also better at coding / product than managing himself. (i worked at the company before both 'founders' jack and ev joined as employees.)

This won't work in the US. The problem is the way government contracting works. Government Digital Service in the UK has managed to reform things there because they demanded and got to control the way the UK contracts for software. The whole nice 18F folks in the US are great people but they lack the power to fix anything.

FUNDAMENTAL CONTRACTING AND BIDDING REFORM IS NEEDED.

I've got more than 10 years of rails experience. I started with Rails 0.5 in July 2004. So looking at the calendar we're at 10.5 years. There were only like 5 people including DHH when i joined the #rubyonrails irc channel. And on top of that i've done lots of other things in the rails world, like managing people since then. The thing is, rails has changed so much, i'm not sure how much value there is in that. If i were hiring it'd be a red flag that somebody only stayed doing rails for 10 years. A good developer learns new languages and frameworks. A language a year and all that.

Perhaps the hiring drone was saying 10 years of web development experience maybe?

Ezra was a playful hacker who was never afraid to strike out and build something crazy.

Mujica's great. I've lived on and off in Uruguay for a decade and really things are going pretty well. There's laptops for all kids, free internet for everybody, no taxes on tech companies, free universal education and universal healthcare. What's more he's somebody who believes in leading by example.

The thing is, he's not actually retiring. He's president of the senate and leads the largest faction of the governing coalition. Once he steps down from the presidency he'll still be the major power broker in the government and 3rd in line to be president again if anything should happen to Vasquez (new president) and Sendic (new vice president).

He's a friendly old uncle figure who everybody finds adorable. But don't for a minute think that he isn't an incredibly savvy political player. I think he plays up the act because it's not as scary than having somebody who's a libertarian marxist as president.

When we built twitter we had also hacked up various forms of RSS readers. At the time nobody on the team really thought they were going after rss, news reading, or discovery. But it turns out that trying to solve that problem in parallel to the status update system. Twitter was for a long time very much built upon the RSS stack of technologies. It was a semi-open platform which worked better, unfortunately, than the fully open world of RSS & ATOM.

In the end, now 8 years later, it's clear that twitter DID kill rss as a dominate category of apps & services. We went from being overwhelmed by unread counts on the 'readers' to having flow. I'm not sure it's better, but it did solve the problem of feeling like you needed to keep up.

I think there's still more interesting work to be done in this space. Open social networks (that's what blogs are folks) plus users being able to control visibility of posts and frequency and open api's could do something which could unseat twitter/facebooks.

I was just going to say the same thing. What the hell kind of group offers security and VPN services and then sends passwords plaintext!

It's not like you need to ask a language community's permission to build your own thing in that language. Before Rails the Ruby community was very OO focused. Rails isn't very OO to be honest. It tends to used lots of composition and duck typing. You can see the major shift in the libraries before and after rails.

The question is, could somebody build a strong framework for web applications on Go? Maybe, i'm still learning the language myself so i don't know. Just because the language designers don't like it, doesn't mean that somebody won't come along and do it.

I don't mean to be a bit difficult here, but i wonder if the tutorial's author had anybody actually try it. I mean it seems like there's tons of missed steps, sections missing, assumed bits which aren't done. Each example i try tends to have other things done, uh, as exercises for the reader, which are required before the code samples even work.

It's so friendly that Uruguayans and Argentines don't identify the other as foreign. Uruguayans didn't want to be their own country when their started their independence war, it was an attempt to not be part of Spain or Brazil and to be joined with what would become Argentina. It was the British who decided Uruguay would be an independent country. Since then in the last 200 years, they've developed somewhat distinct institutions and cultures. It's similar to the relationship between the US and Canada.

I think it's a matter of definitions. Demographically the countries are actually more similar, there is just differences in how people identify. The biggest difference between the two countries and cultures is Uruguayans are secular both in personal culture and with regard to the state. Where as Argentines are Catholic. There's also a big difference in political culture, structures of political parties and faith in institutions. Uruguay has much less corruption.

I think what he did was take the official exchange rate. I live on that amount (or a bit more), but i've got two kids in private school, a house with a pool, house keeper, etc.. It's important to use the real exchange rate not the official one.

Just because it's never happened doesn't mean that it won't happen, just as the percentage's suggest it's very unlikely.