eldude

While typically intertwined, voice and validation are only equivalent if you lack character or integrity, which by definition are voice in the face of opposition. I'm suggesting that the author is struggling with precisely this: whether to hold to alternate values that will make her son happy, or encourage her child to seek the limited happiness founded in dependency on validation through achievement. In other words, she is conflicted about teaching her child anti-individualism or independence.

What an alarmingly raw exposure of the narcissism that pervades the Valley. The author's conflicted, borderline self-loathing struggle for counter-cultural self-awareness amidst the myopic career obsessed pursuit of "achievement" and relevance is quite revealing.

Should she further the "achievement" of her child through cultural conformance and obsession with "achievement" and corresponding status, or is it her who needs to find her own voice, not defined by external validation. She laments how comfortable she is with her status accredited largely to Stanford, and is ambivalent to whether she wants her child to drink from the same source.

This is a "humblebrag" mix of a genuine and slightly insincere search for yet more validation. Children are a symptom and reflection of their parents' values. To acknowledge the limitations or shallowness of a life defined by a pursuit of "achievement" and validation for her child, she must become self-aware and acknowledge the same throughout her own life.

> Raw performance is efficiency.

Efficiency is analogous to velocity, with gains analogous to distance. Highly efficient developers must still travel non-trivial distances to achieve performance gains, and therein lies the core of my epiphany, that performance is not efficiency, and highly efficient developers must spend non-trivial amounts of time to achieve performance gains that may in fact undermine development velocity, CPU efficiency per task, architectural efficiency (DRY), time efficiency (latency), etc...

WRT American pre-calculation and its relationship to software...

One of the great personal epiphanies of my professional career was the discovery of data pre-computation FLOABW. More specifically, what I'm talking about is data denormalization.

I had always been aware of caching techniques, but beyond that, data normalization was so ingrained into my mindset, that storing any piece of data that could otherwise be derived from another seemed like heresy, something only an amateur or fool would do.

What really opened my eyes, was when I was forced to build a social network atop MongoDB (ouch), and I had to resolve the incompatibility of relational data, but with atomic write, with no join or transactional support. What I discovered, was that if care was taken to create a canonical representation of the data, a multitude of query-able denormalized derived tables could be utilized, and could in fact offer dramatically superior performance compared to its RDBMS equivalent. What was especially shocking, was how obvious this was in retrospect and how blinded I was by the assumption that perfect data consistency was a requirement for all software.

I now view most tasks with the consideration, "What would this look like if we ignored efficiency in favor of raw performance and might that be worth it?"

WRT async/await, don't lazily prefer serial await, when parallel await is possible:

Serial example:

    async function someAsync(list) {
      let ret = [];
      try {
        for (let item of list) {
          let res = await asyncFn(item)
          ret.push(res)
        }
      } catch(e) { /* ignore */ }
      return ret;
    }

Parallel example:

    async function someAsync(list) {
      let promises = [];
      try {
        for (let item of list) {
          let promise = asyncFn(item)
          promises.push(promise)
        }
        return await Promise.all(promises)
      } catch(e) { /* ignore */ }
      return [];
    }

It would likely have the following traits:

1. Decentralization 2. Realtime 3. Spam protection 4. Contextual

1. Decentralization typically generates wide adoption, once it's able to overcome the barrier of entry to wide adoption. An excellent example of this would be JavaScript. It thrives largely because nobody owns it, and contributing to its success it's often used as a means to stave off the advantages of competing platforms.

2. Realtime meaning push, just because it's a modern technological expectation. Email frequently is realtime, except IMAP/POP.

3. GMail et.al have gotten pretty good here. Future solutions would need to be as good, ideally with some built-in mechanism for unsubscribe as well.

4. Contextual messaging would be the defining feature. It's a broad term that simply means some manner of object graph between messages that would natively support arbitrary organization of messages (flat, nesting, topic stream, overlapping (for edits), etc...).

I'm having difficult finding the studies, but here's a research paper on the subject that includes a lot of evidence on the matter: "The evolution of prestige: Freely conferred deference as a mechanism for enhancing the benefits of cultural transmission"[1]. Once you're literate in power dynamics, you'll see evidence everywhere.

> I see a lot of people take glee in punishing other people

The fact that prestige is more effective than force, doesn't mean that force isn't effective. Imagine someone who's completely undeserving of any prestige-based status, yet has the means to control a business. Prestige-based status is unavailable to them, so they will use force, and eventually, the only employees that stick around are those that accepts such uses of force. (Imagine a toxic work environment)

Silicon Valley on the other hand (or engineers) are in high demand, and thus have no need to endure use of force (abuse) because there are those that will employ them that are deserving of prestige.

[1] http://www.hirhome.com/academic/hen&gil.pdf

Use of power to punish, especially those considering joining your tribe, are empirically shown to be disliked and generate a reduction in available power over and alignment with those outside the tribe. This will hurt Zenefits, despite the CEO's intention to strengthen it. This was an amazing opportunity for the Zenefits CEO to publicly and prominently compete and make the case for working at Zenefit's (in a general sense, not for this candidate specifically). Instead, he ran away and threw the candidate under the bus. Shameful.

I can't help but feel that releasing Swarm was akin to giving someone a lateral "promotion" within an org to remove them from a space you don't want them in any longer, like Milton being moved into the basement in Office Space. They wanted to pivot, but with check-in so core to their identity, they had to move it to the basement so the rest of the core app could flourish.

Does anyone here actively use Swarm or any other Ambient Social Network? Why & what is your take? Like the various other Ambient Social Networking apps that came before it (Highlight, Sonar, Banjo), it would seem to suffer from a severe chicken and egg problem.

With so much politicization on the internet today, I was skeptical while I watched this, thinking there would be an ulterior message, but it's actually really good. I enjoyed watching it a lot. I also am not sure if this should be on HN, but it was enjoyable enough that I'm cool with it.

Survivorship bias. The history of Google's non-attempt to replace managers is almost comically bad. They announced in an all-hands meeting that going forward, all engineers would report directly to Larry Page and all project managers (present at the meeting) were out of a job. In other words, Google thought that managers were effectively useless, fired them publicly in front of the whole company, and didn't try to replace them with any manner of alternative.[1]

Long story short, it's not difficult to "sell" managers when the alternative is anarchy.

I think managers are toxic in an engineering organization, and a disincentive toward expertise; Rational intelligent engineers would be foolish not to abandon their expertise for a more rewarding (financially, politically, effort-wise) management track. That said, I consider it even more foolish to have nothing in their place. Managers serve a variety of roles that will be filled, implicitly or explicitly in any tribe/organization. Further, they resolve the matter of hierarchy and eliminate political position jockeying (while exacerbating other forms of politics).

If you pay attention, you'll see that modern software organizations are straining on the verge of breaking with current management styles. No viable alternative has reached mainstream (except maybe holocracy), but in the coming decade, one will.

In my company, we're replacing the classic management hierarchy with something closer to a federated republic where the various roles of management are broken into separate roles for separate individuals, with the goal of placing engineers on top with multiple peer-based support roles. Something close to this will be the software organizational hierarchy of the future.

[1] http://www.slate.com/blogs/business_insider/2014/04/25/googl...

There's a presumption here that there's an objective "good" for society, likely as defined by this professor. One of the primary virtues of capitalism is that it makes no such presumption and empowers and frees disparate tribes to pursue their own "good" within the bounds of a constructive construct.

Correspondingly, one of the vices(?) of socialism is the presumption of a single societal good. This of course makes sense when we have non-reproducible/limited resources like the environment or rights that could conflict like the use of force, but for all other resources like how we spend our lives, what we build, where we go, what we enjoy, freedom by definition means a subjective "good".

I always find it curious when postmodernism (skepticism of societal mores) presumes any form of objective truth.

These numbers are provably wrong, not to mention comparing apples and oranges. At the very least their "3,000 and 5,000 gallons of water to produce one pound of beef." is completely disproven from their own source[1]. Waterfootprint.org gives 1,847 gal/lb. If we compute the numbers ourselves, we get very different numbers:

    Butter......... 4.89 cal/gal = 3,252 cal/lb /   665 gal/lb
    Cheese......... 4.75 cal/gal = 1,808 cal/lb /   381 gal/lb
    Milk........... 2.27 cal/gal = 276.7 cal/lb /   122 gal/lb
    Chicken........ 1.92 cal/gal = 993.4 cal/lb /   518 gal/lb
    Almonds........ 1.35 cal/gal = 2,608 cal/lb / 1,929 gal/lb
    Almonds Milk*.. (See Almonds)
    Ground Beef.... 0.81 cal/gal = 1,506 cal/lb / 1,847 gal/lb
    Almond Milk

* Almond Milk is basically almonds + water, but the added water is eclipsed by the almond water.

We see here, almonds aren't 10x more efficient, but closer to 2/3 more efficient, and of course cow milk is 2/3 more efficient than almond milk.

Further,

    More than half the entire US water supply goes to livestock

Water going to livestock is a misrepresentation since not all of it goes to produce meat, but in fact goes to produce milk, butter or cheese. I will admit though that the numbers above look slightly suspect. How/why would butter be more efficient?

Lastly, it completely (perhaps ignorantly again) misrepresents other meats with the following 2 easily disproven quotes:

    Meat processing, especially chicken,
    also uses large amounts of water

and...

    The more plant-based foods we eat versus
    animal-based foods….the less water, energy,
    and other natural resources we use

This is clearly false from the numbers above where chicken is actually 42% more efficient than almonds(!), which of course completely validates the anti-almond press and invalidates this entire blog post.

[1] http://www.waterfootprint.org/?page=files/productgallery where beef is listed at "15415 litre/kg"

The sad thing about the author's core anecdote is that he doesn't even understand what about his actions made him a failure. (He alludes to it at the end.) If your app/server is vulnerable to a single person taking it down with no recourse to where you "felt the grim reaper clasp [your] neck," then you have built a house of cards unable to withstand a gentle breeze. The issue isn't that your trust or lack of vetting, it's your dependency on others to build your idea; You're an idea person. It's true, he has no one to blame but himself, but not for trusting a stranger, but for want of software deployment skill.

> That's what this proposal is.

Perhaps you're right, and I merely remain wholly unconvinced, though I acquiesced in the OP that perhaps it will be necessary. Optimizability dictating language features to this extent is the tail wagging the dog. I think this would undermine the ecosystem by creating a subset that is neither Java nor JavaScript, neither safe nor dynamic; a lowest common denominator of sorts that may do more harm than good in the competition with native.

Yes, but that's exactly my point; "strict mode" eliminated a lot of the consensus "bad parts". "strong mode" discourages modern utilized features. Not only are accessing undeclared properties and mutating classes not considered "bad" by the majority of the community, but in fact they're actively relied upon as a feature. It's almost as if Google didn't bother convincing anyone they were bad, because they wouldn't succeed, and instead jumped straight to ruling by fiat, which is precisely why in my opinion this is dead on arrival.

You misunderstand. Object.assign is as available today as is `typeof foo.bar === 'undefined'` or `_.defaults(...)`. Yet I doubt even the majority of modern code always uses them consistently because `if (foo.bar)` or `foo.bar = foo.bar || 1234` is much simpler and much faster.

I think this is part of the problem. Adopting "strong mode" will make lots of modern code obsolete. At least there are sane alternatives though, but it would also require setting empty properties on classes and undermine duck-typing. Yes, it's doable, but it fundamentally requires a non-dynamic approach to JavaScript programming, a highly dynamic language.

This is dead on arrival:

    Some examples of strong mode changes we are aiming for are:
    accessing missing properties throws, arrays cannot have holes,
    all scoping errors are static, classes are immutable.

Specifically, "accessing missing properties throws" will undermine how developers use the language. Options objects require this as a feature. Immutable classes might also be an issue as language extensibility / monkey patching is another feature, enabling a whole swath of Aspect Oriented Programming solutions like New Relic's monitoring or the node.js async trycatch library.

I do wonder though, in fighting for its life against native, whether JavaScript will need to adopt optimizing solutions like "strong mode" to strengthen where it's weak.

EDIT: It's really unfortunate that I'm getting down voted so severely (from +3 to -3 in <10m). HN increasingly discourages discussion and debate. I don't think there's any question that my comment adds to the conversation. At most, I could have added, "In my opinion..." to the beginning of my comment.

Fun fact, some of those (obviously false) statements regarding nuclear energy may in fact be true depending on interpretation of their original meaning. We still have yet to harness mass-energy-equivalence for power. Modern nuclear energy, both fission and fusion, are more accurately nuclear potential energy (like a hydro electric plant and water).

From Wikipedia[1]:

    E = mc2 has frequently been invoked as an explanation for the origin of energy
    in nuclear processes specifically, but such processes can be understood as
    converting nuclear potential energy in a manner precisely analogous to the
    way that chemical processes convert electrical potential energy.

I don't know, but it seems reasonable to me to conclude that when Einstein stated the following, he may have been referring to mass-energy-equivalence rather than nuclear potential energy, which in fact continues to hold true for the foreseeable future:

    There is not the slightest indication that [nuclear energy] will ever be
    obtainable. It would mean that the atom would have to be shattered at will.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass–energy_equivalence

And you'd be hiding the blocking on the require call, the primary reason why on-demand loading is an anti-pattern in node.

> A close friend once said that, in order of seriousness, relationships go “business partners, spouses, cats & dog.”

Prioritizing cofounders over spouses surrenders Silicon Valley's moral authority and undermines its cultural leadership.[1]

I've always found prioritizing cofounder over spouse a sad depressing commentary on priority of money over change by bad actors. Innumerable colleagues and VCs have quoted me unprompted, "You can divorce a wife, but you can't divorce a cofounder," leading me to doubt their integrity; It's only true if you prioritize your business over your vows.

It is far more difficult to succeed when prioritizing family, but such is the burden of leadership. Moral authority, a prerequisite of true leadership, derives from such commitments.

[1] Power derived when a leader embodies the values of their followers.

Honestly, I don't see anything here that will make them competitive with offerings like Jive Software, currently being used by the majority of Fortune 500s and more SV companies than you'd think.

https://www.jivesoftware.com

Jive Software is used successfully by the majority of Fortune 500s.

1. Linus is in a dominant position. Dominance doesn't invoke indignance when it's directed toward non-tribesman or by the alpha (the paper discusses this). What's interesting about this, is you can read whether someone perceives Linus to be an/the alpha based on whether they reject or accept his behavior. Further interesting, if they accept his behavior, they are likely self-associating with whichever tribe they consider Linus to be the alpha of (e.g., programmers, Linux, OSes, etc...).

2. Yes, I agree on a VC's concern of risks on the viability of a market. (See First Mover Advantage myth) I'm focusing more on the way it's communicated rather than the content or the why.

3. Yes, I think you're right that a VC is masking weakness if he asks this, as opposed to, "How are you different from X?" Though, IMO it's still an assertion of dominance, similar to a veil of bravado.

There are a lot of comments here about the adversarial nature of a such a question, and they're completely correct: Asking this question is an assertion of dominance. They're also not wrong that assertions of dominance tend to backfire and elicit indignation.

The key insight though, is that dominant individuals tend to respond to assertions of dominance with their own return assertion of dominance. In other words, they don't like being dominated, and it's this reaction VCs are typically looking for as dominant behavior is likely perceived as a requisite character trait for entrepreneurial success. Programmers though tend to conversely be a prestige driven culture and respond negatively to dominance challenges like this.

If you're curious to know more, checkout the very interesting paper "Two Ways to the Top: Evidence That Dominance and Prestige Are Distinct Yet Viable Avenues to Social Rank and Influence"[1]

[1] http://www2.psych.ubc.ca/~henrich/pdfs/Cheng%20et%20al.%20(2...

Windows support for high DPI (4k) is absolutely terrible! I recently tried setting up an MSI Ghost GS60 4k [1] for a client. By all means it was the greatest laptop I'd ever seen, until we came head-on with Windows 8's terrible (absolutely terrible) support for 4k screens. Scaling was inconsistent and several business applications did not scale at all, rendering them unusable with no viable alternative (apart from using an external monitor).

[1] http://usgaming.msi.com/Product/2014/Notebook/GS60-Ghost/

Based on the findings of this article, the OTC EGCG should "restore metabolism to youth levels."

Using a decarboxylase or AADC[0] inhibitor like EGCG[1] found in green tea extract limits peripheral serotonin metabolism, especially if you're supplementing with serotonin precursors like tryptophan or 5-HTP to avoid heart-valve issues.[2]

See Examine.com's note in the 5-HTP article[3] and the associated citation.[4] 800mg of EGCG 2 hours prior to supplementation demonstrated decarboxylase inhibition.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aromatic_L-amino_acid_decarboxy...

[1] http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000MYW2ZA/

[2] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15781732

[3] http://examine.com/supplements/5-HTP/#summary5-1

[4] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11374875

> But if you were asked to draw a person running, many of you would have the resulting stick figure (and let’s be real, you’d draw a stick figure) moving their right arm and right leg forward at the same time.

A stick figure running does not have an identifiable left or right side...