peri

Ah, we were thinking of the same one. It's worth noting that his brother, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_James , wrote some of the most lyrical philosophy and psychology works of the late 19th century.

Is this the same (American) Henry James that I think of as a novelist?

Do you have any particular poems, or collections that you would suggest?

And one poet I never appreciated when introduced to her, but love now: Edna St. Vincent Millay http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edna_St._Vincent_Millay

Renaissance and Other Poems is full of just staggering work: http://books.google.com/books?id=vxUpAAAAYAAJ

Eliot is amazing; folks who love his work do themselves a disservice, however, if they aren't also reading Ezra Pound ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ezra_Pound ) for a very different perspective on most of the same inspirations that made Eliot's early work so powerful.

This is (arguably) a better book than GEB ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gödel,_Escher,_Bach ) for the literature-minded folks out there. I can't recommend it enough.

This is a great one, and one that often comes up when I tutor students. It's even better if you can teach it as a sing-along.

As somebody who studied lit, this is an impossible question to answer, so I'll just link to my favorite John Donne ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Donne ) poem from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holy_Sonnets, number 14 http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Holy_Sonnets#Holy_Sonnet_14

  Batter my heart, three-person'd God; for you
  As yet but knock; breathe, shine, and seek to mend;
  That I may rise, and stand, o'erthrow me, and bend
  Your force, to break, blow, burn, and make me new.
  I, like an usurp'd town, to another due,
  Labour to admit you, but O, to no end.
  Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend,
  But is captived, and proves weak or untrue.
  Yet dearly I love you, and would be loved fain,
  But am betroth'd unto your enemy:
  Divorce me, untie, or break that knot again,
  Take me to you, imprison me, for I,
  Except you enthrall me, never shall be free,
  Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.

It's set to music in the fantastic Doctor Atomic by John Adams, with a superb recording available from http://www.metopera.org

Edits: still not good at HN formatting, should be good now.

Thanks for this comment. I think that we'd find each other in strident agreement, which is why I typically only go to smaller or more academically inclined conferences these days.

That said: a lot of us have constructed our identities through exploration online, so the notion that IRC and GitHub are not expressive of personal identity sounds a little weird to me. It's very, very hard to actually separate identity from the developer, especially when it comes to activities like bug triage. I don't have a good answer, but I think there's an assumption that what we can measure necessarily is what is important, when what we measure in terms of programmers is often what's easy to measure.

I've posted about my personal experiences and how I've personally discouraged all sorts of contributors by ignorance in the past here on HN. For example, I re-submitted recently this blog post on a back and forth that I had with antirez: http://jculpon.github.io/fighting-sexism.html

We were able to resolve that via some twitter messages and some time to let both of us calm down, but at the time I was ready to stop using redis, much less helping folks via bug reports and patches.

Hi, I don't know your gender either, but I know lots of F/OSS developers whose names and legally represented genders have changed, even in projects I've committed to. There's a fairly big mix of attribution errors available, and ignoring the presence of silent women, non-binary folks, and transgender developers hasn't made my communities more welcoming to those folks.

Community building is very, very hard work and it involves a lot more than linking to classics like ESR's smart questions. In fact, in my experience, those responses tend to put off newcomers with backgrounds that are different than programmers like me (and presumably you) who have been tinkering in this community since the early 90s.

YMMV, of course, but I think personalities are incredibly important and the most valuable thing you can do in building big communities is making sure that as projects grow they gain stewards, shepherds, or whatever metaphor you prefer that can welcome as well as gatekeep.

> Ironically, you are probably a better bet for a lot of employers than that average young single male because you value stability. You're not gonna jump ship because you want a foosball table or expect to have lunch catered every day.

Unfortunately, the market for labor is notoriously unequal and illiquid. The desire to save via a large workforce of what you're calling "averge young single male"s often looks much better on a balance sheet than a few well-paid older folks. There's lots of different kinds of capital, but SEC filings definitely favor "objective" measures like number of desks filled.

This matches my experience at Columbia completely. I felt completely out of place and estranged outside of a few geek-interest clubs. I'm lucky I found those — coming from public school, even a really good one, the culture shock was overwhelming.

In US law, at least, there is a large distinction between public school administrators searching a particular student and large-scale searching of students, even if the search only pertains to publicly available information. You can see the issues more clearly if you think about the history of freedom of speech cases vs. public schools, especially those pertaining to freedom to practice religion.

A corollary to this is to make sure you leave gracefully if you feel you must leave. You may be the lead developer on this project, but you probably have lots of projects ahead of you. I made the mistake early in my career of burning some bridges I shouldn't have over titles. Took a decade or more to realize what I had done.

There are lots of ways to make people feel good while keeping pay, benefits, and professional relationships professional. Not knowing where OP is from or where their company operates, I'd give them wide deference in terms of ensuring they follow the law, but talking to an HR professional (who should be involved at this point anyway if there are dozens of folks) can give a lot of good ideas on how to make people feel special without breaching contracts.

As a practical example, Dynamighty listed every full time Dynamighty worker in alphabetical order on CounterSpy, but then called out individuals by their major contributions within the longer credits. It's not a perfect system, but it provided a good balance between giving due credit to folks who worked long hours for equity and those who were making normal salaries the whole time.

I hope for the best for you with this. In my experience, the mixed results are part of the process. Think of it more as R&D costs rather than "loss" per se, and it may be easier for you (and your investors) to think about.

Management is hard. We're all learners when it comes to working with people, especially when some of the people are smarter than we are. Keep learning!

Speaking only for myself, the boring parts of personal/20% work often pay huge dividends when I go back to non-personal work.

This is a great way to lose special people

And should expect more novel NTP and time issues before it.

> In fairness, you don't know what would have happened if you took the other path.

I think my mental health was greatly improved, though of course I can't know the alternative :)

As someone who's much better off as a person having a B.A. in Computer Science in five years than their intended B.S./B.F.A. in four, I think the both components are vital.

The undergraduate major I ended up with has definitely opened some doors; if I had finished the other half of my degree I wouldn't need to spend nearly as much time proving my literacy in other languages on the job. Most of my clients do business in English, so it's not a major disadvantage, but for someone who wasn't lucky enough to pick up a midwestern American accent at home, both the liberal arts side and the major can be vital for proving that you can do what you need to while you're not a "senior" or "highly experienced" candidate.

Sensible heels can also work, as can boots. If you're interviewing for a position that will involve working on physical infrastructure, make sure your interview shoes let you walk comfortably through a (very, very cold) server room.

No, I couldn't do so two days ago, unfortunately. Sorry for any confusion.

In my mind, no, it is not. But it's been a long time since I've contributed code to a *BSD.

Thanks, was in a hurry to catch my train.

I've only scanned this on my phone, not really dug in to the math, but this strikes me as significantly more serious than the current comments here suggest.

Low power tracking is a significant part of the motivation behind mesh networks in other applications, and the authors here are quite familiar from my school days. I may have more to say in a few hours, but this is likely a Big Deal.