Earlier quoted context omitted.
That was.
Normally I don't upvote humor on HN, but that was great.
-1 redundant
Steve Yegge: Follow Up to His Accidentally Public Rant
161–170 of 178 posts
Re: Steve Yegge: Follow Up to His Accidentally Public Rant
#162I worked at google for a couple months this year. My experience of their so-called open corporate culture was a bizarre mix of elements from William Gibson's _The Belonging Kind_ and Robot Chicken's _Our Newest Member, Calvin_. It was one of the loneliest and depressing experiences of my adult life (but with really good food). That said, it turned out that way because I was stupid and naive and let myself get flung i…
>there's something very rotten, elitist, and ineffective going on at the googleplex and the initial frustration in Steve's rant hinted to me that deep down he knows this too.
He does.
He wrote the original to pander to them, while bashing Amazon.
Re: Steve Yegge: Follow Up to His Accidentally Public Rant
#163Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not even close to being the same thing. Google does search. That's what they are known for. Advertising is how they monetize search (which incidentally came long after they launched their search engine). Only us geeks with an axe to grind would associate Google with advertising before search. Would you call a site like Daring Fireball a site that specializes in thoughtful essays on technology? Or a site that tries to…
A product is something you sell to a customer. IMO, Emacs is one of the best pieces of code that the FSF makes, but there's an important sense in which it's not accurate to call it a "product" of theirs. Google sells advertising space to advertisers, while they give away search and maps to the users to facilitate the selling of said advertising. (GMail is an exception because they offer business products built out of…
If we want to be nitpicky, one could claim Google has multiple products since they sell advertising in search, maps, gmail, and more.
Re: Steve Yegge: Follow Up to His Accidentally Public Rant
#164The issue of "so smart he needs a challenge so leave something for him to find" may overlap with "so narcissistic he needs something to smack you with so make a deliberate 'mistake' for him to find". I've found this quite effective; some people just need to find _something_ wrong with your idea/presentation/execution, so when they're going to review it, don't polish it to perfection - leave an error somewhere; you kn…
I've always called this tactic "The Admiral's Pipe" after this story: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/brada/archive/2005/05/12/417064.aspx
It's also been called The Duck:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2349378/new-programming-j...
Re: Steve Yegge: Follow Up to His Accidentally Public Rant
#165Earlier quoted context omitted.
The theory is usually stated as A's hire A's and B's hire C's (because they are afraid of being usurped)
Also B's can't tell the difference between A's, B's and C's.
Since classifying people appears to be so trivial it can be boiled down to one character, does being bothered by the use of apostrophes in pluralization make me an A, a B, or a C?
Re: Steve Yegge: Follow Up to His Accidentally Public Rant
#166Hey Steve, lots of Hacker News readers are just as smart as Jeff Bezos. Some of us may even be smarter. You may remove every third paragraph for him, but you can remove every third word for us and we can fill in the rest with our giant brains. Here goes: Last week accidentally posted internal rant service platforms my public account. It somehow viral, which nothing short stupefying given it was massive Wall Text. The…
troll.
Re: Steve Yegge: Follow Up to His Accidentally Public Rant
#167The issue of "so smart he needs a challenge so leave something for him to find" may overlap with "so narcissistic he needs something to smack you with so make a deliberate 'mistake' for him to find". I've found this quite effective; some people just need to find _something_ wrong with your idea/presentation/execution, so when they're going to review it, don't polish it to perfection - leave an error somewhere; you kn…
Leaving something minor but wrong for a government site visit team to find is not an uncommon tactic. They feel they did their job, and the site doesn't get written up for something truly insane.
// no, I'm not still bitter about be written up for having too many (1 onsite, 3 offsite) secured backups.
Re: Steve Yegge: Follow Up to His Accidentally Public Rant
#168Hey Steve, lots of Hacker News readers are just as smart as Jeff Bezos. Some of us may even be smarter. You may remove every third paragraph for him, but you can remove every third word for us and we can fill in the rest with our giant brains. Here goes: Last week accidentally posted internal rant service platforms my public account. It somehow viral, which nothing short stupefying given it was massive Wall Text. The…
troll, also assuming roughly uniform paragraph lengths removing every third word is the same as removing every third paragraph. Maybe we're not as smart as you thought.
Re: Steve Yegge: Follow Up to His Accidentally Public Rant
#169A hyper-intelligent alien is supposedly in our midst and the only evidence given of his vast intelligence is that once upon a time he asked why two software concepts that have been used prominently for years to great profit in his software business that's been running for years were left off a list? Really?
Re: Steve Yegge: Follow Up to His Accidentally Public Rant
#170Earlier quoted context omitted.
A product is something you sell to a customer. IMO, Emacs is one of the best pieces of code that the FSF makes, but there's an important sense in which it's not accurate to call it a "product" of theirs. Google sells advertising space to advertisers, while they give away search and maps to the users to facilitate the selling of said advertising. (GMail is an exception because they offer business products built out of…
If we want to be nitpicky, one could claim Google has multiple products since they sell advertising in search, maps, gmail, and more.
Are these discrete products to their AdSense customers? I would think it would make more sense to break it down by display/text than by site.