Viewing profile — yoak

I wonder if "boring" here just means "clear." I had a great case of this yesterday. We were reviewing a piece of code by someone that could have been better with a basic algorithm …

It was great to see Paul make the very first connection that I made upon hearing the news. The deal had to be absolutely fantastic for the founders otherwise some portion of the be…

I grew up in a steel town and the version of the story there involved whacking with a hammer.

Using American English throughout: inflammable, flammable: http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=inflammable%2Cfla... regardless, irregardless: http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/gr…

I agree with everything you say here. I only take issue with claims that Amazon was violating someone's right to free speech. I no more think people shouldn't boycott Amazon if the…

It doesn't violate someone's right to free speech or any other right for a company to fail to provide a service to them. A company having to provide service to some particular enti…

My wife, suspecting that there is no such thing as inborn rather than developed talent, ran an experiment. She took something she was terrible at even after some fiddling -- drawin…

I struggle with brevity. :-)

I've heard that called the "Spanish waiter" trick and seen it done with full plates. It's cool.

That was so well-drawn that I kept waiting for it to be funny but it never delivered.

Not at all! For the reason that google explained on the blog, it is a dumb response to remove or penalize this particular company in the wake of the media froth. The admirable and …

The most common thing I see from such people is a desire to break off and do whatever is being done at their current company, but to do it right instead.

I heard he totally would have made it too, except no one would sign his NDAs.

I've rarely seen a code of ethics adequately specified such that it accomplishes its aims and can be followed. This is no exception. It seems well-intentioned. It seems that it wou…

Again and again we see people migrating from closed to open technologies, often despite initial strong advantages of the closed platform. I wonder if the same thing could happen wi…

That's an excellent litmus test on whether there is likely to be anything actually valuable there. On the other hand, I wonder how much more traffic they might get from the people …

As the other commenter pointed out, that's not my point. If I issue a billion shares and offer you stock options at a $0.10 strike price you can't really expect the company to grow…

I really appreciate this article. Unimaginably, most programmers I interview to this day in late 2010, react primarily to number of shares an offer includes option to buy. I've wri…

Re-reading that, I realize it could be read as my thinking that I believe all my ideas are "insanely good." What I meant is that I have many ideas that are compelling to me and see…

My problem is typically how to pick between all the insanely good ideas I have floating around. I would say my number one rule is to pick something that is a deeply personal itch t…

I see this theme over and over again for businesses and organizations as well. One of my favorites, Good to Great talks about "Stop Doing" lists. Jack Welch pushed GE to end the bu…

It is awesome to see them being so consistent and publishing all of this. I've never seen a non-profit do so in such detail. Some of the comments here (particularly the stats) migh…

That looks like it could allow extending a practice common in only fairly new startups to more mature and larger organizations. I like the idea of people being able to find things …

Most of the most talented won't have those credentials and, in my opinion unlike getting sample problems, being asked for the credentials is such a red flag that the best won't app…