limelight

I think it's overwhelmingly a generational thing, not a "white collar" thing. Older white collar workers still want/expect lifetime employment, while young workers of all kinds are more comfortable with labor fluidity.

The vast majority of my young friends are uninterested in jobs which would provide lifetime employment. (As am I.)

Honestly, it was incredibly risky for HubSpot to hire Lyons and the outcome seems predestined. He came in with completely mismatched expectations and an ax to grind.

This is also a huge contributory factor to ageism in tech. Of course you won't hire older people when they expect lifetime employment at a startup which might not even exist in a few years.

Do you have links to those studies?

I've always found the reflexivity of class to be somewhat interesting. Economically, my family is in the bottom quartile of the country—but it never felt like that. They definitely raised me with "upper class" values and attitudes. (For example, there was never even a shadow of a doubt about whether I'd attend college.) My grandparents, on the other hand, were quite well off.

As such, I've always felt more comfortable and fit in with people whose families have incomes vastly exceeding my family's.

No, it's pretty unique to the Costco business model that they can do that. (Costco is not a "typical" retailer.)

> Because this is people's health you're talking about.

That argument is about as valuable as "think of the children."

> Do you feel drivers should have to get a drivers licenses?

That's not the right analogy. The equivalent would be requiring special licenses for all car dealership employees, which is not required. Salespeople aren't themselves doing anything medical and there's no reason they should have additional requirements beyond normal salespeople. We already have laws covering both (a) fraud, (b) minimum requirements of healthcare plans.

> A simple health example off the top of my head

Existing consumer protection laws would cover this. You can't sell a product and claim it has a feature which it doesn't — that's fraud.

Nothing about health insurance should mean that salespeople should require licensing. It's pure rent-seeking. There are plenty of other dangerous things which are sold by salespeople without licenses.

> Multiple code bases may be a pain, but they still produce better UIs when you support more than one OS.

I don't know if that's universally true.

Slack uses Electron for its desktop apps, yet has received a lot of acclaim for its UI and seems to be trouncing alternatives with truly native offerings (IRC, HipChat).

I was nodding along throughout this and pretty much agreeing that overall a big company makes sense for most people.

Then I got to the final footnote. That kind of Kafka-esque bullshit is what keeps me working in startups. I could not stand working in a culture where policies which are widely seen as unhelpful and ridiculous are still routinely inflicted upon employees.

Yes, startup "bullshit" also exists, but the difference is that it's totally possible to avoid that bullshit by picking a good startup to work at. I've never had anything like the experiences described in [1], despite working at 3 different startups. On the other hand, big company problems seem to be universal: it's not possible to find a big company without at least some arcane and employee-hostile policies. (For example, Google's blind hiring keeps me from ever considering working there.)

[1] http://totalgarb.tumblr.com/tagged/startupbullshit

> We're soon to have elections and it looks like we'll have Geert Wilders for prime minister

That's incredibly depressing. I only know of Geert Wilders from the court case (it was part of a law class), but I always assumed he was some uber-fringe politician who would never get anywhere near high office.

The world is entering a new period of radicalization and I'm very worried about the consequences.

> I disagree. It is like FizzBuzz for sysadmins.

Why would you give a "FizzBuzz for sysadmins" question to full-stack developers though?

> This is coming from someone with showdead on, FWIW. I rather like seeing the things that others have deemed "not worth seeing".

FYI I also have "showdead" on and like the approach taken with Enhancement Suite.

The biggest reason I had for writing this extension is when certain users spam a thread with their repetitive points. At that point, it's easiest to just block them. (Though blocking doesn't hide their comment completely, so it's easy to toggle people back on.)

It's mostly to avoid getting dragged into pointless arguments: https://xkcd.com/386/

A more accurate title would be "Why Jet didn't choose C#" as they don't seem to pay any attention to the non-Windows stacks available.

I'm still no closer to understanding why they would build a startup on a MS stack, a question I've been pondering for the past year and a half.

Yup, I think this is actually one of the more interesting problems on the web today. We have access to more and more information than ever, but it's not organized in good navigation or narrative structures.

Interestingly, I actually think where the innovation is needed is on the input side. It's possible to produce a structured and personalizable story today, but it requires long programming lead times. We need to create systems which make it possible to build such stories at the speed of news.

--- (Shameless plug, but if anyone is interesting in this problem space I'm currently hiring. Email morgante@cafe.com if interested.)

Has anyone used something like this for non-fictional contexts? I'm really enthusiastic about the future of interactive journalism, particularly in terms of tailoring journalist narratives to each reader.

For example, I think coverage around the announcement of a new tax plan should adjust to the given user (ex. "Under Clinton's plan, your taxes will increase by 5%, to $14,000 annually."). Unfortunately, there just don't seem to be many good tools for allowing non-programmers to encode manipulable facts into their narratives.

This post reflects an interesting technical narrative of companies switching off MongoDB to more traditional relational databases as they grow.

Importantly, I don't think that's an indictment of MongoDB. Instead, it highlights the key advantages of NoSQL: ease of use and rapid iteration.

When you're first working on a project, MongoDB is very easy to slap in. You don't even have to create tables/collections. As you iterate, you don't have to constantly be updating schemas as your product direction shifts. Thus, MongoDB is perfect for early startups.

As a company scales, of course it's warts start to show. The very attributes (like schemaless storage) which were an asset when just a few developers were hacking on the project become a drawback as the company grows in size. Reliability becomes more of a concern.

Naturally, people shift to a more traditional database. Personally, I'm almost ready to switch some of our core functionality from MongoDB to Postgres. This isn't an indictment of Mongo though.

> you can use virtualenv for isolated environment

That's my biggest gripe with Python packaging. Fundamentally, virtualenv is a hack for the fact that the Python ecosystem fundamentally doesn't embrace that one computer can have different projects with different dependencies. Compared to npm (for example), it's much much worse.

I think those sorts of questions are highly ethical, and should in fact be encouraged.

By asking deep questions about actual problems the company is facing, you get a much better sense of a candidate's relevant abilities than with generic algorithm questions.

> this may be a stupid question but why is it hard for you to give OpenSSL money?

Primarily because it's not tax-deductible. I try to restrict my charitable donations to things I can deduct.

The other reason I don't is that I'm not convinced it would be used effectively. They shouldn't be using small donations as their primary source of funding, they should be going after huge corporate supporters.

I'd be happy to donate $100 if it were tax-deductible and if OpenSSL committed to making the minimal effort of reaching out to major tech companies for substantive funding.

Right, so both industries have dress codes and programmers don't really have much more choice in what to wear than lawyers.

I don't read Gladwell to learn anything. And that's okay—there are plenty of other places I read to learn.

Like the rest of The New Yorker, what Gladwell provides is interesting, entertaining, and realistic stories. Whether those stories are entirely true or not just isn't relevant. It's about entertaining myself and occasionally having a thought-provoking discussion about Gladwell's work. None of this actually affects how I do my work or interact with the world.

However, a good portion of this enjoyment is contingent on the stories ostensibly not being fiction, largely due to the "stranger than fiction" effect. If Gladwell were to write complete fiction, then we wouldn't have plausible lines of reality to reference in his work, or the entertainment of seeing the convolutions he makes in bending reality to his thesis.