111–120 of 178 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Android, Youtube, and Maps aren't products?
All acquisitions though.
My apologies for straying near politics but i think Yegge's just defined the best characterization of the 1% :P > In some sense you wouldn’t even be human anymore. People like Jeff are better regarded as hyper-intelligent aliens with a tangential interest in human affairs. The difference between this description and Yegge's later description of Bezos as being like the Dread Pirate Roberts of Princess Bride fame, is t…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The cult of the MBA likes to believe that you can run organizations that do things that you don't understand. Exactly. A few years back, I found myself in a one-on-one saying: "you would think someone taking a job managing a hog farm would at least know what a hog is." Though, that was about web-development. A suitable allegory.
Except it doesn't always apply. Lou Gerstner and Meg Whitman are two examples from the technology world. Both came into their jobs at IBM and eBay with zero tech experience, but got up to speed very quickly. Of course, had they failed to do so they would have been out within a year or two.
I /hate/ going with hires who are "good enough." The nightmare employee is someone who is not quite bad enough to get fired.
Actually, majority of successful leaders (founders, etc.) have s very strong "bullshit detector": for kind of bullshit one can use to receive promotions all way up to a director position - even up to VP.
And it also shows that some people are not succeeding because they are paralyzed by fear of poverty.
"That’s where the “Dread Pirate Bezos” line came from. I worked hard and had fun, but every day I honestly worried they might fire me in the morning. Sure, it was a kind of paranoia. But it was sort of healthy in a way. I kept my resume up to date, and I kept my skills up to date, and I never worried about saying something stupid and ruining my career. Because hey, they were most likely going to fire me in the morning."
How else can you know your on the 'edge' of your own personal abilities? Nice to know that no matter who you are, those feelings don't go away... unless your Bezos (hey there has to be a few people like that around). :-)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This isn't a difference; you can do the same on Facebook. Here are a couple of examples: via a Facebook page called 'notes': http://www.facebook.com/notes/web20/robert-scoble-on-cloud-c... via user Scoble's wall: http://www.facebook.com/RobertScoble/posts/10150358391274655 . No Facebook account needed to view either.
Notes have been around for 5+ years and I've never seen them linked as news stories. In contrast, I've seen Google+ updates consistently submitted as news to HN and other sources. There is a significant difference between Google+ updates and Facebook Notes and it's worth thinking about why. I suspect it has to do with the fact that status updates and public posting in Google+ are the same interface. For Facebook, sta…
Facebook started primarily as a website for college students to share privately with their friends.
Google Plus started by emphasizing that you can choose who you want to share with (including the public) and shipped with a "subscribe-like" feature that allowed technical people to add many of the same tech celebrities that they were following on Twitter. Since it takes awhile to convert one's friends to a new service, for many tech people, reading public posts by these other tech people became the prominent way they use the service.
You can mostly do the same things on each site (albeit at different levels of convenience), but their beginnings help shape how people think about and use the sites.
His description of presentations to Bezos reminds the infamous BillG reviews http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/06/16.html
Any copy of the original anywhere? As an aside: did he just say Franz Liszt was "famous-ish"?!
The fact that you reacted that way indicates that he's not actually as famous as you'd like him to be. If he'd described George Washington as a "famous-ish" general, you'd know he was being sarcastic.
Back on topic, I always used to smile when I saw the Lisp interpreter known as Franz Lisp load up. Pity they re-branded it.
His description of presentations to Bezos reminds the infamous BillG reviews http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/06/16.html
Enjoyed that link a lot. Thanks.