getpost

Then he should call it, "a culture of no surprises and collective problem solving." Calling it "no excuses" is part of the management problem he has identified.

My experience is, there are often other dimensions to the issue of commitment.

There is a conscientiousness that comes from being an owner of a company. It's rare to have an employee who maintains the same level of attention as an "owner." That's just how things are. Demanding that employees increase their attention to their work won't change this, or at least not for long. As the article suggests, you can work on developing a culture where people are more likely to be forthcoming and cooperative, but that only goes so far.

There are some employees who do attend to their work the way an owner would, often to their own detriment. Overwork is a real problem for their own wellbeing, and their overall ability to grow and change. It can be a problem for the employer as well, for lots of reasons, including an over-reliance on a few key people.

You can make sure that everyone has enough of a stake to consider themselves an owner, as in a co-op, but co-ops don't seem to scale. That's fine for plenty of businesses, but not for the kinds of businesses that venture capital wants to invest in.

EDIT: The clip art illustrating the article, Pinocchio, suggests a moral element in the author's world view, it conflates lying with missing deadlines and making excuses and not keeping people informed. If people are lying to you as a manager, you should ask yourself why.

How is this not an anti-trust issue?

Of course the government wants this capability to access anyone's system, so I assume nothing will be done. This has to be one of the worst things that has happened in the history of computing.

EDIT: Handy for CBP use, I imagine.

OK, one more thing. This "I can flout the law in my new business" attitude is a great example of white privilege, and this is why this attitude really grates on my nerves.

I read What We Look for in Founders[1], and I think the section on Naughtiness conveys the wrong message, unless pg actually intends to suggest that, for example, the graywall tactics that Uber has used are desireable. Is Portland's law against services like Uber's a law "that matters?"

pg makes a more specific case for disobedience in The Word "Hacker"[2], and maybe he really does look for people who will flout the law when they see fit.

I don't see an easy way to rephrase what pg is saying in a way I'd prefer to see it, except to say that the there is a distinction between civil disobedience for the purpose of insisting on human rights and mere criminal behavior. Surely YCombinator does not want to invest in criminal enterprises, no matter how clever or hackish.

[1] http://paulgraham.com/founders.html [2] http://paulgraham.com/gba.html

In jurisdictions where Uber is illegal, Uber's graywall activities are organized crime; there's no other way to put it. How is it any different than, say, an app that advises drug couriers where there are (possibly undercover) enforcement agents. This is serious stuff, and in no way does the desire to provide better taxi service justify it.

In 20 seconds of googling I didn't find pg urging entrepreneurs to be naughty. I did find YC's ethics policy[1], and the only mention the of the law that I see is related to sales tactics, "Not using misleading, illegal or dishonest sales tactics." This needs revision.

There are lots of laws that are challenging and problematic, even impractical to follow exactly, e.g., the tax code. It's one thing to interpret the tax code in your favor; it's another thing to write a program to distort your business information to avoid taxes.

[1] https://www.ycombinator.com/ethics/

EDIT: Found the naughtiness link. Reading now.... EDIT 2: I'm completely opposed to drug laws. Drugs laws are sickening and immoral, and our society and countless individuals have paid a terrible price as a result of these laws, but that doesn't make it ok for me to sell drugs on the street.

Looks like oasisbob answered, thanks!

So they built a big strong dam and a "protected" it with a smaller, weaker dam. Seriously, what was the rationale for this design? No criticism or Monday morning quarterbacking here. I'm genuinely curious what the original engineers were thinking.

That was the first thing that caught my attention. Travis' statement reeks of narcissism and grandiosity. The understatement is "extreme." "My job as your leader," -- it's an episode of Lost? The remedy is to behave in a way ..."that makes us all proud."

Of course, we elected a narcissistic and grandiose president, so there's nothing new here.

I still don't get it. Assuming it's true that there was a lack of clarity on whether he had the appropriate type of visa, why was he held 10 hours? Why was so much time spent on his case?

And why badger a 70 year old Australian children's book author who had visited the US 116 times previously? [1]

Not to ignore or minimize abuse by CBP officers, but from the CBP perspective, from the tax payers' perspective, what possible value derives from this behavior? Is this purely a result of a lack of leadership, bad management, and hiring unsuitable people for the task?

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/feb/25/australian-c...

Building a fancy corporate HQ is often a signal that management has lost touch with the core business.

EDIT: I can easily make the case this has happened at Apple. Look at their iPad lineup, for example. How do I figure out which model to buy? IIRC, this lack of focus on the product line was one of the first things Jobs addressed when he returned to the company in 1997.

This is not to say that Apple isn't one of the most successful businesses ever. It argues against bigness. When you're that successful, you can't (it seems) help but make very expensive decisions rooted in hubris and grandiosity. Imagine what could have been done instead with a $1 billion new building and $4 billion in venture capital, for example.

The US government has the same problem. The amount of wealth captured from the overall economy gives government leaders/lobbyists too much power, and we get the f-35.

I will, once I've had a chance to look at it more closely. It's captured my imagination. I'd forgotten about ipfs.

And, not that it's the main idea, but merging the file paths and an email address is something 'everyone' can understand. Twitter built a whole business around @somebody.

edit: Many potantial uses are described in the overview. Read the whole thing. https://upspin.io/doc/overview.md

Wow, this is really brilliant, and there's the potential for high disruption. Only for file sharing? Not as I see it. I'll have to make time to try this out asap.

Asking Holder and Huffington to get involved is grandiose. I imagine isn't difficult to avoid being grandiose when you have a multi-billion dollar valuation. The thing is, what's needed is a culture change, and these people aren't going to change the culture. It'll just be another distraction.

Agree with CPLX. It is improper to speak for others in this way. If Leo and Sunil want to post about their plans, they may do so. "Leo and Sunil asked me to to say this...." would be fine, although still TMI.

A customer might think, 'Wow the company is falling apart and the remaining founder seems lost in his own world. I should find another vendor.'

I enjoyed using Twitter for ~8 years. It gave me access to news and opinions from groups that aren't covered by traditional media, and it functioned as an RSS feed for people I wanted to follow (authors, researchers, etc.)

However, I quit Twitter because it wouldn't let me control my own data. I was in the habit of favoriting things that I wanted to follow-up on. Then Twitter changed Favorites to "likes," which wrongly implies I'm endorsing the content. Twitterati know that likes don't necessarily mean anything, but imagine a customs officer looking at my likes, for example. Twitter doesn't provide a method to batch remove all likes, so I tried various 3rd party utilities. The utilities seemed to work initially, but likes would later reappear, even months later, as if restored from a backup.

This experience helped me see that silos can never be trusted.

I'm curious, what's the fraud's mental model of what he is doing? Does he know he is cheating, and is he telling himself that's what he has to do to survive? Or does he not actually know that the code has meaning and that he can't, in general, cut and paste to solve a problem?

If it's something like the latter, I wonder if this behavior is encouraged by our school system. The jr high/high school homework I hear about is mainly done by cutting and pasting answers, with no effort to learn or understand the content itself.

I used awk until I learned Python (long ago). For me, awk was yet another example of the "worse is better" approach to things so common in unix. For example, if you make a syntax error, you might get a message like "glob: exec error," rather than an informative message. "Worse is better" is probably a good strategy in business and for getting things done, but still, mediocrity and the sense of entitlement that so often goes with carelessness, sickens me.

Actually, we do get to blame Hollywood (partly). http://www.berkeley.edu/news/berkeleyan/2008/03/05_torture.s...

When I was a child/teen, it was popular to wonder about the effects of TV violence, and now we know. It appears many people are unable to distinguish between TV and reality. Monkey see, monkey do.

My experience is that few physicians have any idea what various procedures cost, especially in a hospital setting. Advance cost information is very difficult to obtain, and often there isn't time to obtain it.

I'd like to see at least the protocol used in automobile repairs. You get an estimate and approve it. If the estimate turns out to be incorrect, you have the option of deciding on another course of treatment. This scenario can't work in many situations, such as surgery, but knowing some costs up front would help everyone make better decisions.

If adherence to estimates can't be made to work, I'd like to see limits on how long after a procedure you can be billed. At present, it's not at all unusual to get a bill months after a procedure from a completely unexpected source. There's usually no way to determine whether the amount billed is correct.

Slightly off topic, but this brings up the issue of whether data maintained using technological means is correct. And how can the correctness be verified or refuted? For example, suppose Amazon does provide data in reply to the warrant. How is anyone sure it's the data from the specified device at the time in question? Database errors happen all the time. It might be possible to use other means to assure that the data is correct, but it's unlikely anyone with the necessary knowledge would be assigned to this task.

Similarly, in LA, there are no fare gates at metro train stations. Occasionally police stop people leaving the station to check whether fare is paid by scanning the transit smart card. What if the card malfunctions? What if the scanning device outputs the wrong information? I have no way of contesting or verifying the information on these devices. It would be me, the passenger, held to account, not the infrastructure technology.

Carole Cadwalladr's points are well taken. I tried the queries myself when I saw these articles and got the same results she did.

Apparently Google is listening, since some of these results have been changed. Was it a manual fix? So, Google's results are the output of an algorithm, except when they're not? Who decides which results will be manually fixed? And fixed how?

I think many, if not most, Internet users do treat search results as authoritative, even though the cognoscendi know they're not intended to be.

The real question is, can this situation ever be fixed in the general case? Reporting what is "true," and not just popular. I doubt it. Some things are clearly not true, but what is true? That's the biggest AI problem ever.

My experience is that employers, and people generally, are completely unpredictable. An employer might seem supportive, but later on decide that your side project should be company property.

And, people hear what they want to hear. The employee hears, "good luck with that project, great idea!" and thinks that means the employer doesn't want a stake in it. The employer might simply be intending to encourage the employee, thinking the project is obviously company owned.

"Having the conversation" only muddies the waters.

This is rich. James Clapper says the rule of law is under assault, which is true. He's a notable assailant! He hasn't been indicted for perjury, and the CIA is spying on Senate oversight, for starters.

In 1995, Gary Taubes (lately a writer on health and diet) wrote a profile of Thinking Machines Corp.

The Rise and Fall of Thinking Machines A close up look at a doomed-yet-brilliant start-up computer company that never quite grasped the basics of business.

http://www.inc.com/magazine/19950915/2622.html

Using an untested procedure for a non-essential health intervention does raise a mental health question, or certainly a question of judgement.

And anyway, of course it's a hit piece! The vampire metaphor is just too juicy.

https://twitter.com/johnrobb has some interesting observations

http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/globalguerrillas/2016/07...

http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/globalguerrillas/2016/03...

This isn't right. You water the soil, and the soil moisture is uptaken by the plants. Watering the area immediately around the stem doesn't work, except for growing seedlings.

What do you mean by "fair?" Business isn't about being fair in the sense of fair play ("chivalry"). Do you mean your employer is engaging in illegal monopolistic practices? Is advertising fraudulent?

I don't see any comments on the question of whether a commercial entity has legal standing to control the use of products it sells. A commercial entity relies on the legal system to enforce any restrictions, so this amounts to a question of whether the public should facilitate and subsidize the political wishes of a commercial entity. I think not, just as the taxpayers should not be subsidizing inadequate wages paid by companies like Walmart.

Export laws, being enacted and enforced by a government, are a different matter, of course.

I'm strongly opposed to the death penalty, for both moral and practical reasons. This story is another reminder for me on how the functions of government have been co-opted for private gain. This kind of thing makes everyone poorer.

Exercise on a bicycle for an hour? This instead: http://www.menshealth.com/health/ejaculation-and-prostate-ca...