> Adding nootropics and stimulants, like the original Soylent guy did, is also interesting. However, to avoid complicating things, I will add this later. I don’t really know which substances, but at least ginkgo biloba.
I think you are taking on too much risk in order to get attention. Your grumpyness might be a result of some other health condition like sleep apnea that you need to take care of before taking on a radical diet that will leave you sick and more overweight. Take the time you would have spent working on Glow instead working on an existing up-and-coming language like Go. And, good luck. I know what its like to feel like you will try anything to fix your life and get relevant. But inventing a new language is not where its at. Tom Hickey who is one of the smartest people I know and one of the best presenters I've seen can't even convince most to use Clojure. It isn't easy.
What's wrong with inventing a new language? Nobody has to use it. Do they?
Or is he staking some vast amount of his personal reputation on it? some how?
I'm suggesting the combination of possible health problems combined with a pattern of trying to reinvent everything. I'm familiar with this pattern myself. I'm suggesting not to go down this road, and instead focus those creative efforts on something with more promise.
I also think that there are problems with all other languages we use, but like I said, this is a very difficult road.
If you want me to be blunt, I think he is incapable of it, and he is wasting all of our time with a "what if" post about a language that will never exist. Happy now?
That's already a sunk cost to everyone in the thread. Further criticism - that doesn't address the reasons people are enthused, serves as a time-sink for no return in value.
i.e. if you want it to go away from altruistic concern, you're probably better off addressing the flaws in the concept or ignoring it. ^_^;
Compatibility: Is it someone you could spend a month with in the woods without hating, abandoning, or killing each other? But he must be able to argue his side and be right- you don't want a "yes" man. You need the other hand of the steering wheel to course correct when needed. But you have to be able to spend a massive amount of time together.
Complement: Does he fill the gaps (in more than just technology) that are missing in the team for success? This is not just a coding or tech position. He may end up being project management, product management, sales, accounting, office manager, etc.
Charisma: In both well-accepted meanings of the word: (1) compelling attractiveness or charm that can inspire devotion in others, (2) a divinely conferred power or talent.
Those three are most important.
Skillwise, look for someone with proven experience (mobile development), preferably in Android, iOS, HTML5, one or more modern JavaScript frameworks (Angular, Backbone, etc.). Also, what would they write in service-side? (Java? Go? Node? Sinatra?) What would they serve that with, and do they have experience setting that up? Server-side will need significant Linux admin experience, experience working with Amazon services/cloud storage, significant hardware setup and networking knowledge, has setup network before at work not just in his or her house. Good with PostgreSQL or MySQL- can setup, admin, design schema. Someone adept with design and user experience. That is the bare minimum. You need more than that to be successful, though. Anyone can fake those enough to get the job, but can they manage themselves, design the product, work 48 hours straight to fix things, etc.?
MBAs with a "good idea" looking for a CTO to implement it are a dime a dozen. If you don't have a great sell, no one worthwhile will apply, so have a good tech lead review any job you post before you post it, though you really will be better off with a referral. And to bring them in, you will need to have everything that the CTO doesn't have- the connections, the money, and the ability to sell (if needed), etc. Don't be a hardass and don't sell too hard- be yourself but more professional. Pretend this person is an angel or VC you are trying to sell, then turn it back a few notches.
This person is not an employee. They are a founder.
> Documentation is often not the best way to understand code.
I hope they teach that in college now. As much code as possible should be self-documenting. It can be short and/or efficient (one-liners ok), but it should be clear to someone with experience, so have good method names, variable names, decent formatting, organization, etc.
It took me about 8 years of professional coding experience before I truly appreciated this, so hammering it in in college is key.
I guess the point that I was really trying to make was that reading the code and documentation can only get you so far, and doesn't help nearly as much with the bigger-picture "why" questions. (The code I worked on, in addition to being well documented, was also IMO pretty well organized and clear.)
I'm glad Linus and many others are reviewing Kernel changes still, but how long will it be before there is nothing stopping massive corporations from deciding what can be changed?
And even with all of the experienced eyes, there have to be changes that have crept in that they didn't realize could be misused, and may still not know.
I appreciate that corporations are the biggest donators, and that is extremely important, but is there any point in which we say, "Get your own project?"
Would you prefer hardware manufacturers not to contribute drivers? And that these companies fork the kernel without providing anything back? That's not very much in the spirit of openness.
(Regardless, I'm not even sure how number of contributions would make any contributor "unstoppable".)
> TL; DR - The earth's rotation drags the tidal bulge faster than the moon's orbit slowing the earth and giving more energy to the moon which moves it into a higher orbit.
Is there no way that this is a misinterpretation of the facts? Couldn't the answer be that the Earth is losing mass through its atmosphere (into space), and due to having less mass, the moon has less gravitational pull with the Earth, and the orbit becomes larger?
A good question. However if the Earth was becoming lighter then that would affect the gravitational interaction with lots of things like satellites, passing asteroids and maybe our orbit around the Sun. I'm quite sure the change with all the satellites would be easily noticed.
I would have shared this post with others, but the first graph is serioualy racist-looking. Regardless of how accurate it is, there is no reason to show faces with the names that show skin color going with a significant rise in debt.
Tim, you didn't fail. The industry has failed. For the past few-to-several years, books on technology have been obsolete by the time they are written- not just published, so you can't make money off of selling even digital copies of books. Developers read about the latest technology in project readme's (markdown formatted in GitHub), a wiki, one or more blogs, StackOverflow, and so on.
What else could your company do to stay relevant? I really have no idea. Posts on your site that come up in Google are often outdated, so O'Reilly to me is at most a place where developers that want to give talks and lectures can publish a book, which probably won't sell much. Maybe it will boost their resume or help them get more contract work? I really have no idea why people give talks and write books anymore. It seems like a waste of time that could be spent developing. Developing good code makes you relevant now.
I just feel sorry for the whole situation. I would have hoped will all of the publishing money from the 1990's and early 2000's, you'd own your own island, where you'd be on the beach drinking Coronas. But instead, the company has apparently tanked. That sucks. I liked the animal-covered books.
Good observation but I disagree, to some extent. Technical books that teach low-level knowledge and technologies will always become obsolete quickly. But books that enable the reader to understand deep concepts rather than shallow technologies have a much longer half-life. This is similar to the complaint that engineering school is always "behind the technology curve" which is nonsense. You don't go to school to learn technology, instead, you learn the basis underlying it. This latter knowledge changes much more slowly. A good technical book should aim to teach the same.
Even deeper, something like regular expressions, how do they work?
Or shallower (sort of?) you can't sell a cookbook of "whats the regular expression in perl to match the first word of a sentance" because we have google for that, but you can sell a style guide type book like "Modern Perl" where you probably could google everything in that book, but it would take 1000 different searches and not have a common voice.
His company hasn't tanked. I think you might have skipped the part about how they've in recent years have put tens of millions in the bank. They are making more money now than what they did when the book publishing market peaked around 2000.
The article is not about the failure of his company, but about what mistakes he think he made along the way.
from: http://fendrich.se/blog/2013/01/24/pre-programming-mental-si...
> I am, in fact, a grumpy, skeptical, philosophically materialist atheist.
from: http://fendrich.se/blog/2013/04/09/a-better-soylent-good/
> Adding nootropics and stimulants, like the original Soylent guy did, is also interesting. However, to avoid complicating things, I will add this later. I don’t really know which substances, but at least ginkgo biloba.
I think you are taking on too much risk in order to get attention. Your grumpyness might be a result of some other health condition like sleep apnea that you need to take care of before taking on a radical diet that will leave you sick and more overweight. Take the time you would have spent working on Glow instead working on an existing up-and-coming language like Go. And, good luck. I know what its like to feel like you will try anything to fix your life and get relevant. But inventing a new language is not where its at. Tom Hickey who is one of the smartest people I know and one of the best presenters I've seen can't even convince most to use Clojure. It isn't easy.