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Evan Williams posted a message on Twitter

“"When you improve things by an order of magnitude, you haven't made something better -- you've made something new." - @stevenjayl”

September 2 at 8:31 pm - Link

ana, Antoine Bertier, Ray Grieselhuber, arunthampi and 2 other people liked this

Then you've made something new AND you made something better. Not many can say that :) - Vincent van Wylick

Allen Hutchison shared an item on Google Reader

South Carolina sheriff buys tank to conduct raids

September 3 at 1:17 am - Link

ana liked this

mental note to self: never, ever visit or consider visiting South Carolina (don't think it's going to be a problem) - Knut via twhirl

Lane Becker posted a message on Twitter

“"The first rule of holes is that when you're in one, stop digging." http://is.gd/1Y6s”

August 27 at 7:36 am - Link

ana, Patricia Hanrahan and Adewale Oshineye liked this

Ana Belén Ramón added a product to the Amazon Wish List Wishlist

The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World

August 16 at 11:19 am - Link

ana liked this

Adam Kazwell posted a message on Twitter

“Mingling at conferences is tough...how do you interact like best friends with people you barely know??”

August 7 at 1:38 pm - Link

ana and Ginger Makela liked this

Alcohol. That would make an awesome panel. Two shots of tequila at the door. - Kevin Fox

That's why they have conferences in Las Vegas. - Chris White

Evan Parker posted a link

Major Breakthrough: Music's 'DNA' Decoded | Listening Post from Wired.com

August 8 at 12:54 pm - via Bookmarklet - Link

ana, Anthony Farrior and Chieze Okoye liked this

wow, this looks awesome. can't wait to see this trickle down to audacity. 8^P - Chieze Okoye

zephoria bookmarked a page on delicious

MySpace gives pastor ‘prophetic’ edge

August 4 at 3:51 pm - Link

ana, Harry Hoffman and Ken Kennedy liked this

This is GREAT!! - Ken Kennedy

Adewale Oshineye bookmarked a page on delicious

Secrets of greatness: Practice and hard work bring success - October 30, 2006

August 4 at 6:31 pm - Link

Sidharth Shah and ana liked this

"In virtually every field of endeavor, most people learn quickly at first, then more slowly and then stop developing completely. Yet a few do improve for years and even decades, and go on to greatness." - Adewale Oshineye

Great tips. I hope they find their way in the next edition of the patterns book :) - Vlado Handziski

At some point in the next month I have to change: http://softwarecraftsmanship.o... to make more explicit reference to Ericsson's notions of "deliberate practice" and possibly the, out of print, book called Etudes for Programmers - Adewale Oshineye

Cool. I did not know that you have some of the content online! - Vlado Handziski

The plan is to put everything online once the book's published. - Adewale Oshineye

Ben Griffiths posted a message on Twitter

“Biting comment spam on my blog: "Your guestbook is an example of middle-class guestbooks. Congratulations".”

August 4 at 5:30 pm - Link

ana and Adewale Oshineye liked this

Dare Obasanjo posted an entry on Dare Obasanjo aka Carnage4Life

Paul Graham, Changing the World and "Built to Flip" Startups

August 3 at 7:17 am - Link

ana, Atul Arora, Adewale Oshineye, Yuvi and Dennis E. Hamilton liked this

Gregor J. Rothfuss bookmarked a page on delicious

YouTube - We Love Google - Made by Google global employees

August 3 at 9:06 am - Link

minus3 liked this

if you ever doubted that google has a glut of MBAs. fortunately, in any downturn, they will be the first to be let go. - Gregor J. Rothfuss

LOL - minus3

I don't know whether to laugh or cry :D. And actually, Gregor, there aren't that many of us MBAs here from what I can tell, and we ain't running things (at least from where I sit in Engineering). - Adam Lasnik

adam: http://money.cnn.com/2008/05/2... - Gregor J. Rothfuss

:: embarrassed :: - ana

.... my "like" was for Gregors comment (obviously). - minus3

Adewale Oshineye shared an item on Google Reader

thoughts of today

August 2 at 4:02 am - Link

ana liked this

minus3 posted a link

Mike On Ads » Blog Archive » Using your browser URL history to estimate gender

July 29 at 8:29 am - via Bookmarklet - Link

Baron Mok, Jess Lee, luis and ana liked this

Likelihood of you being FEMALE is 69%. - minus3 via Bookmarklet

"Likelihood of you being FEMALE is 52%" Heh. - ana

Likelihood of you being MALE is 84%. wow - luis

Jim Norris shared an item on Google Reader

Summers Vindicated (again)

July 28 at 12:44 pm - Link

Kelly Norris, Eugene, ana, Nikhil Dandekar and 6 other people liked this

I am really impressed by his concise and to-the-point summary of what most of the media reports have patently missed and/or glossed over. I would love to hear what Faust (Harvard's current president) thinks of these findings. - Ana

"We just simply don't know yet. The problem with Summers' claim wasn't that it is heresy to study these issues or consider the hypotheses. The problem is that the president of Harvard is in a position over the policy that could be implemented to remedy what might be a long-standing deep unfairness to women in these fields.… Where Summers was wrong was in seeming to indicate that he wouldn't pursue policies that would try to find a way to improve on past unfairness without weakening his university (the fundamental challenge of affirmative action). Scientists working in this area can and should be considering every possible hypothesis and the relevant data. Policy guys need to be more cautious where the science is uncertain and the policy decisions have significant impacts." - Jim Norris

It's still pretty disheartening to realize how shallow and inaccurate so many press reports are... apparently journalists are bad at math too. - Jim Norris

Maybe I'm just bad at math (or at least statistics), but I fail to see the point this post makes. We are unable to norm for differences in how boys and girls are raised, so I am skeptical of the idea that you can just point to math test scores as a way to determine (or even estimate) biologically differences in math ability. - C. Golis

From p.253 of this article addressing the issue of differences in achievement and that males show greater variance in standardized test scores (http://www.pitt.edu/~bertsch/w...). He makes the argument that this effect could be at least partly attributable to some mental traits lying on the X chromosome, and since males only have one copy of any X-linked gene, one might predict that they should exhibit greater variance in those traits they affect. Male variability would not be a product of what they have that females don't, but rather, what males lack (i.e., a genetic mechanism for buffering against variability). The whole article is actually worth reading because it focuses on how the concept of variance is generally underappreciated, often to ill effect. - Nathan Young

Allen Hutchison posted an entry on Letters From Exile

Why does an iPhone need a computer?

July 28 at 1:56 pm - Link

ana liked this

Matt Cutts posted a message on Twitter

“I love trying out new search engines. What do SEOs and search folks think of Cuil.com?”

July 28 at 12:38 am - Link

Internet Marketing NJ, G. Saunders, Mitchell Tsai, AJ Kohn and 13 other people liked this

First take: pretty interface, poor relevance = rapid oblivion - Bret Treasure

Well right now - "Due to overwhelming interest, our Cuil servers are running a bit hot right now. The search engine is momentarily unavailable as we add more capacity." FAIL - Atul Arora

Show 26 more comments

Matt - Following numerous threads since the launch. Almost all so far 'not even close to Google' - Charlie Anzman

Got the "We'll be back soon" message. +1 @ Atul - BeeLing

How does Cuil compare to Microsoft's search engine? - Adewale Oshineye

On the other end of the spectrum, do site:http://www.cuil.com/ in Google. It has crawled the new cuil pages and they appear in the index and search results (including the unvailable page. - Atul Arora

it doesn't seem very relevant. My blog is not indexed yet :( Is the database exhaustive enough to be meaninngfull? - Jnuk: acidweb.fr via twhirl

try searching for your name on Cuil. Charlie Anzman has a great photo up for that - Sidharth Dassani

Charlie/Sidharth, I don't know why some images don't match the search results. - Matt Cutts

Nice to see you on FF! I promise not to Ban/Block/Delete you! Enjoy! lmao - Igor The Troll

I actually quite like it, it sorts out stuff on the page in a more readable form than Google and quickly found stuff on other Sally Church's I didn't find in Google. Medical terms need writing out in full though, eg it returns zero for CML but useful stuff on Leukemia. I like the UI, it will get better with time. - Sally Church

Seems pretty crappy to me. My search returned results for sites that have not been in existence for a year (an old index maybe?), and one of the top two results on Google search for the same term wasn't even on the first page of results for Cuil. - Matt Devost

I really like the UI, the diversity of results, and the categories features. I think that I'll like the pictures as soon as they reliably match up to the correct search results. (I am not Kevin Scott Collins, for example.) Looks like they're having some issues crawling wikipedia given the number of broken wikipedia results I've seen. Overall relevance doesn't seem as good as Google. I'm guessing that will get better soon now that they've launched and are able to gather data from real users. My $0.02. - Kevin Scott

It's nice to see an alternative to the usual list of results. It's clean and easy to use. The relevancy of results however isn't very good compared to Google, and in fact it's also dished up some rubbish as well. The service has been down as well today. It feels like a beta to me. Mind you, maybe it's unfair to compare to Google results really, because this is us assuming only Google can deliver the right answer. - Ceejay

The interface is brilliant and truly fills a gap left wide open by Google (design can move beyond minimalism), Duplicate links need to be lumped together, this should improve the relevance of the searches dramatically. - Jamie Ginsberg

Most searches I did returned a bunch of porn despite beign in safe mode. When I turned off safe mode, the adult stuff went away. - Mike Seidle

i like the old way better - fijidaddy

My blog wasn't in it but fortunately a chinese spammer's copy of it is. - Sam Pullara

Matt - At this point, I'm just suckin' up all the different takes. It's already gone from interesting to just fun ?! :) - Charlie Anzman

The results are bizarre, even humorous at times, but we need to remember what yardstick we're using to measure the results. If it gives the exact same search results at Google, some will deem it a failure because it's unnecessary. If it gives different search results from Google, some will deem it a failure because they're "not standard." My only quibble is that in my vanity search, items in my blog seem to be drawn from last year. Perhaps a database refresh is all that is needed. - Ontario Emperor

Not impressed with cuil. Did some searches of my company keywords, results were not as smart/relevant as what I find with a google search. Also, I am not thrilled with the 3 column format, especially when the 3 columns are not aligned, which makes it hard to scan and find relevant links quickly. - Greg Bogdan

Very long way to go. There is no real regional specific search results. The world is a bigger place than just the US. To say that they have indexed 10 times the amount of pages is also silly. The good search engines will find the good/popular sites. If a site has not been found its fair to say that it just not that good (excluding brand new sites of course) More pages will not equal better results. - Shane Osborne

First take of cuil.com: they are not nearly prepared as they should have been at launch. It is irrelevant how many web pages they've indexed... if you can't respond to a user search query with relevant, useful results. In reality live.com does a better job than cuil.com. And we all know where live search stands. - Pre Priyadarshane

Results didn't match my expectation (which isn't neccessarily a bad thing), but the main gripe is the layout and point size of the results page. That blocky texty boxy results style isn't easy to scan and I think the point size is too small. Speed etc is something that can be fixed with hardware so just a temporary issue I'd say. - johan

I like the layout personally, and the categories on the right, except that the results are mostly rubbish and the categories don't actually work sometimes (links point to an error page saying there's no results). They say they're using contextual search...really? I'm not seeing it. For "Australian visas" the government website doesn't even show. The images are all mixed up, displaying logos from the wrong companies against the wrong result. Oh dear...what a catastrophe! - Ceejay

I tried searching for diggnation and the only result on the first page actually linking to diggnation webcast was a link to episode 57. The first 2 results were wikipedia. I think they have a lot to do as far as results are concerned. Maybe this is the next big failed launch after Wikia Search - Sidharth Dassani

The quality and depth of results seems thin and the images are just wrong. Now, if they can fix that then there are a few interesting issues, particularly from an SEO perspective. A left to right format may change the click yield for different positions. Is it as imperative to get to the first position, particularly with an F pattern eye-tracking standard. Conversely, the weight of the first page of results (text and images) makes me believe few would go deeper than page 1, increasing desire for page 1. - AJ Kohn

Some interesting observations from Bindu Reddy - http://friendfeed.com/e/f51e6f... - Atul Arora

Atul, good link. In my opinion, Bindu's absolutely correct that the "Explore by Category" entries are entirely from string matches with Wikipedia category pages. - Matt Cutts

In particular I found the description/page summary text poor. Google appears to have refined that well over the years. Cuil concentrates way too much on including the search term in the results as many times as it finds it, which makes the results look like scraped pages (even if they arean't). Truncating the titles and URLs also makes a difference to understanding what the page is about. The layout would work better if each result was the same height, with each horizontal result starting on the same baseline. And how about numbering them 1 to 10? All that said, I do like the more modern feel to it. I wish Google, etc. would mix it up a little more. - Richard Crocker

The only thing i like is their presentation of search results. The relevance goes for a toss most of the time. Its interesting if you try searching for "cuil" ...check the results http://www.cuil.com/search?q=c... - James Ramya Rajan J

Jason Wehmhoener posted a link

Art Students Build Massive Environment Using Only Cable Ties | PSFK - Trends, Ideas & Inspiration

July 26 at 12:14 am - via Bookmarklet - Link

Allison Kipta, Sparky, Akiva Moskovitz, shandiz and 7 other people liked this

"Students at the Academy of Arts in Munich spent over 16,000 hours weaving together an impressive environmental installation made entirely out of cable ties. The space was made using 1.3 million ties and has the look of a highly advanced plastic spider web. 200 square meters of Munich’s Architectural Museum was used for the exhibit, which is designed to “translate sociological terms like self-portrayal, community and retreat into tangible spatial situations”. Named “The Third Space”, the instillation was created for the “Two Hundred Years Academy Of Arts” exhibit." - Jason Wehmhoener via Bookmarklet

I always knew cable ties were awesome, but I didn't know they were this awesome. - ⓞnor

any higher res photos? - bob

There's a couple more photos (still low res) and a WMV movie here http://www.materia.nl/583.0.ht... - Jason Wehmhoener

minus3 posted a link

QBN - Awesome Liquid Table

July 23 at 12:37 pm - via Bookmarklet - Link

ana and Constantinos Michael liked this

Jennie Lin posted a link

Walk it Off: NYC second most walkable city, SF is #1 [gothamist.com]

July 18 at 2:01 pm - via Bookmarklet - Link

Atul Arora, ana, Chris Herbert, Carolina Velis and 9 other people liked this

Really? Kind of surprised, having lived in both cities. I guess Staten Island and parts of Queens really brings the NYC average down... - Jennie Lin via Bookmarklet

Reading comments on the site, love when New Yorkers get pissy about San Francisco. - Hutch Carpenter

Show 19 more comments

I currently work in SF and lived in NYC for a year. NYC has much better mass transit which conversely makes the walking easier. Some parts of SF proper are cut off from the Bart (only thing comparable to the NYC subway) and the MUNI is a joke. Then there's the hills. SF is walkable but I'd put both NYC and Portland Oregon above it, personally - Jason Kaneshiro

True Jason. If you commute from the city down the Peninsula, driving is really the only option. Takes so long to get to BART/Caltrain otherwise. - Hutch Carpenter

Depends on the criteria. NYC (and it should really just be Manhattan) has much better mass transit, but that's not really what this article is about. Although I like NYC, I think San Francisco is prettier and has milder weather, so from an aesthetic point-of-view, I agree. Also, people can be super intense in NYC, which sometimes makes walking unpleasant, even though I do enjoy a pedestrian vs taxi driver fight once in a while. MUNI does kill a lot of pedestrians though. :( - Chris White

having worked in both this seems wrong - nyc much more walkable than sf imho - mike "glemak" dunn

Part of the difference of opinion might be based on whether you are visiting or living/working in the cities. NYC is probably a far easier walking place to live/work, but just because of the sheer size, it's harder to get around just by walking as a visitor. Also, in the Bay Area, so much work is in Silicon Valley, that it's not really a fair comparison. This is about SF, not the Bay Area. - Chris White

So what I don't understand, is why the website considered Brooklyn, and other outer boroughs in with Manhattan? Did they include Marin, Oakland, and Daly City in with SF? That would drag SF down considerably. - Jason Kaneshiro

Jason, Oakland and San Jose are like adding in Boston and Newark. You have to draw the line, and since NYC is basically one city, that's probably the criteria. I think Boston has won these contests in the past. The core of the city is pretty walkable, although nothing's that walkable on the east coast in the dead of winter. - Chris White

This conversation reminds me of Rome vs Paris walkability discussions. Paris has great mass transit, but the core of Rome is more walkable, with sites closer together, and more to see between sites. - Chris White

I didn't add San Jose, Oakland is across one bridge (or BART) and is equivalent to crossing the Brooklyn Bridge. Oakland isn't as far away from SF as NYC is Boston, by any means. - Jason Kaneshiro

City comparisons - walkability, density, size, income - are always screwed up by the way some cities draw their city limits much more tightly than others. So whenever there's a list of cities sorted by any attribute that's going to vary depending on how many suburbs you include, the precise ranking is pretty much always bogus. Walk Score ratings are also arbitrary in about 10 other ways that make arguing about the scores of NYC vs. SF kind of pointless. - ⓞnor

@Nor yep, I agree, and I think a more fair comparison would be: Manhattan Island proper to SF proper. And in that comparison, IMHO SF loses. - Jason Kaneshiro

I think everyone should sell their SF places and move to Manhattan soon. :) - Chris White

New York's weather and crowds keep it from being enjoyable to walk. SF is a lot more walkable most days of the year. - Robert Scoble

SF weather and the crowds keep it from being enjoyable to walk. NYC is a lot more walkable most days of the year. :P - Andrew Baron

I wish I lived in a walkable city. Dallas is distinctly not walkable :-( - JP Landry

@ Hutch: its' true, NYCers do get pissy about SF. I am a NYC-transplant in SF that sometimes gets pissy about SF ;) Anecdotally, I feel safer walking on most streets in Manhattan at night by myself than I do in SF. Maybe it's something to do with the number of people, or that I get a little creeped out by the quiet SF streets. - Jennie Lin

I've lived in NY and Boston. In NYC I walked some but mostly to the subway but In Boston I walked everywhere. It's just a prettier city to walk around in. I imagine SF is the same way. One neat thing about Manhattan: 20 city blocks = 1 mile. - Peter Simard

+1 andrew baron's answer to robert's - perfect! - mike "glemak" dunn

the nice thing about this thread is that the focus is on walking in a city, which in this gas price crazy time is a very positive thing - another very walkable city is chicago - probably the least walkable city i've ever lived in is la - no one walks in la ;) - mike "glemak" dunn

NYC and SF are very walkable, thats why they got #1 and #2. I find though that SF is dirtier than NYC. - Sam Pullara

I lived in SF for 8+ years, and find NYC, Boston, and Seattle more walkable. - Adam Lasnik

http://friendfeed.com/e/c090c0... - Chris White

Atul Arora shared an item on Google Reader

Google Anti-Gravity Ray is Fading

July 17 at 10:03 pm - Link

ana and LPH liked this

It's great how everyone says "Google missed this quarter's consensus numbers, so better throw out 20% time, no more free food, quit hiring, and focus immediately on short term profitability, who's crying now smartypants". Which part of the prospectus did they not understand? - ⓞnor

Yeah, these articles are really dumb. Google is still super profitable, it's just that some analysts (not google) made a prediction that didn't match actual profits. If they were losing money or even shrinking that might be a story -- this is not. - Paul Buchheit

"Google: Just Like Every Other Company." Everyone wants to write that headline. Heck, everyone wants to read that headline. Same as "Obama: Just Like Every Other Politician." Rules like that help people understand the worlds they live in without expending too much effort. - Daniel Dulitz

j1m posted a link

Guy Kawasaki’s Alltop Launches Frienderati: The Top Friends From FriendFeed

July 14 at 7:13 am - via Bookmarklet - Link

"Since most of the content on FriendFeed comes from Twitter anyway, Frienderati is really is pretty much the same thing, with a few different names." -- reminding me once again how little I like seeing twitter content on FF. I'm pleased to see at the moment there's none of it on my first page. Kawasiki's thingamajig, however, is still interesting. - j1m via Bookmarklet

So much for the a-list and all that stuff being dead... - ana

Nelson Minar bookmarked a page on delicious

NY’s top child porn

July 12 at 9:34 am - Link

ana liked this

Mark Pilgrim always cracks me up - Nelson Minar

Adewale Oshineye posted a message on Jaiku

Google Can Have Stupid Ideas, Too - Stefan Tilkov's Random Stuff

July 12 at 7:00 am - Link

ana liked this

Jim Norris posted a link

The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs: A lesson in badges

July 9 at 10:24 pm - via Bookmarklet - Link

Emily Miller, Nikhil Dandekar, Erhan Erdogan, Kirubakaran and 16 other people liked this

"This dork, James, however, is someone neither of us speak to. Why bother? Look at him. Lights are on, but no one is home, as our friend Ethan says." - Jim Norris via Bookmarklet

wtf? - Paul Buchheit

Show 7 more comments

Wild. - Louis Gray

Oh, I see what happened: http://images.google.com/image... reminds me of http://friendfeed.com/e/5cc0e4... - Paul Buchheit

green badge lol - Hao Chen

It's too bad the real google isn't as exciting as the one I read about on the blogs. - Paul Buchheit

feedstealer! - Rob Schonberger

You've got a private feed! What's he supposed to do? - ⓞnor

Oh... my... gosh... You will never live this down, Jim :) - Bret Taylor

right, thats it. i'm going public - Rob Schonberger

Right so definitely not a Google employee. Thanks for the confirmation Nikolai. - Erica Baker

Paul: Or maybe that's just what Google WANTS you to think! ;-) - Brent Newhall

Allen Hutchison shared an item on Google Reader

'Huge demand' forces O2 to pull plug on iPhone 3G pre-orders

July 7 at 9:25 am - Link

accesine and Adewale Oshineye liked this

I tried to order one of these this afternoon, only a few hours after receiving a message from O2 that they were available. No luck, all sold out :-( - Allen Hutchison

These iPhones might be sleek and all, but I feel that they are inferior to say, Treos or BlackBerries in terms of helping you getting stuff done. Speaking as an iPod Touch and Treo user. :-) - ana

I got the SMS but decided not to order it because I suspected that there would be a catch of some kind. I'll get mine from the Apple Store after it's been out for a week or so. - Adewale Oshineye

l.m.orchard posted an entry on 0xDECAFBAD

Queue everything and delight everyone

July 4 at 1:17 pm - Link

Michael C. Harris, Russell Beattie, brian cors, ana and 8 other people liked this

You're right on target. - Jerry Schuman

Interesting guidelines. On a related note, I'm not sure if it's acknowledged or not, but most modern webapps use a lot of queuing. Dopplr does it heavily, for instance, and I do it increasingly in Expectnation. Obvious to somebody like you, but I wonder if it's accepted best practice yet? - Edd Dumbill via twhirl

Show 7 more comments

I thought something like this was becoming increasingly obvious, but it's even occasionally controversial in my experience. Queues are hard (they can be); or the processing can be made fast enough with a bit more work (it won't be); or simultaneity and consistency are paramount (not usually true). - l.m.orchard

This is cool... it's obvious to me when it becomes a problem. I've never worked on twitter-sized issues, but the idea of queuing writes makes sense and can be done elegantly. Flickr does a nice job, I think wrt tag renames - Dave Dash via Alert Thingy

A brilliant article. Many Siebel users spend their life complaining about performance. The truth is they are actually waiting in a Web based application for an operation that could (and undoubtedly should) provide immediate feedback to the user coupled with an asynchronous message to update the employee record in the payroll system. - Andy C

My friends who work in banking IT are always amused as web2.0/LAMP gradually rediscover the various tools they've been using for enterprise integration. I eagerly await the point when people re-discover topics and tuple spaces. - Adewale Oshineye

Also, green-screen 3270 terminals. Those are going to hit the web in a big way any day now. - ⓞnor

Like this: http://www.zephyrcorp.com/Imag... - Adewale Oshineye

I think it shows how *non* mainstream queuing is that Google's AppEngine has no ability to run background processes. It's all request/response with a maximum of 9 seconds. If this sort of thinking was even somewhat the norm, there would have been screams from people missing such a vital feature. :-) - Russell Beattie

That's an ActiveX plugin? A pure JS 3270 emulator would be just too awesome. - ⓞnor

There were screams but sadly we were drowned out by people asking for support for Common Lisp/Php/Perl/Groovy. Take a look at: http://code.google.com/p/googl... and http://code.google.com/p/googl... - Adewale Oshineye

It's web-based (works only on Windows and in IE) http://www.zephyrcorp.com/web-... - Adewale Oshineye

Adewale Oshineye shared an item on Google Reader

Twnge ("Engineering the next generation of Twitter-like web scale messaging services") (Twnge)

July 3 at 12:50 am - Link

ana and Vlado Handziski liked this

Running experiments instead of just armchair architecture? Wow! - Nick Lothian

j1m posted a link

Mac OS X approaches 8 percent market share

July 2 at 12:32 am - via Bookmarklet - Link

Thomas Brox Røst, Atul Arora, Parth Awasthi, Ginger Makela and 2 other people liked this

Interesting... *rubs chin* - Cyvros/fyc

Ionut shared an item on Google Reader

Learning from Flickr's Co-founders on Their Way Out of Yahoo

June 20 at 4:40 am - Link

ana, ryan and Jess Lee liked this

"The next time someone gives you a hard time for being a freak at work, just cluck at them knowingly and think about Flickr." heh - ana

Bret Taylor shared an item on Google Reader

Done, and Gets Things Smart

June 17 at 1:12 am - Link

Tavi, Vinay | विनय, Michelle Lee, Rich Bragg and 46 other people liked this

Looooong, but great read. I often felt at Google, on the sales side of things, we were so smart that we were stupid. I can't tell you how many meetings I sat through where simple solutions (and, probably, the right solutions!) were ignored because they sounded too simple. And we'd spend a full hour coming up with complicated, convoluted, confusing solutions because that's what smart people do, right? Come up with arcane stuff? Agh. It was all gas. Not throwing anyone under the bus -- I was as guilty as anyone else. - Ginger Makela

100-word version: "You're not as smart as you think you are. You need to find people way smarter and more effective than you. You can't find them with normal interviews. A six-month trial period might work, but what super smart person will stand for that? Your only real hope is that you've bumped into them some time in the past, or maybe you can find them by asking around. Good luck, and also I made up this weird phrase which doesn't help." - ⓞnor

Show 16 more comments

Ginger, thanks for sharing your experience at Google. - Mike Reynolds

First page down, giving a Like for that. Continuing to read... - Hutch Carpenter

Really great read, and a true take on the types of "smart" out there. Also, I liked this little add-on Steve had in the comments section: "The Dunning-Kruger Effect has a fourth principle that I didn't mention, which is that as your competence increases, your self-evaluation diminishes. The most competent people apparently tend to rate themselves below their skill level. " Interesting thought. - Hutch Carpenter

The core of any good engineering culture is deeply allergic to unnecessary complexity. "Fancy" is a bad word; "complicated" is a really, really bad word. Design doc templates have a section asking you to explain why a simpler solution would work. Half my interviewers (having convinced themselves that I could code) were making sure that I wasn't the type to build giant rickety abominations. But a company like Google is too big for any single generalization to apply. - ⓞnor

ⓞnor: "and also I made up this weird phrase which doesn't help" Ha! :) - Bret Taylor

@nor if you do that for every Steve Yegge post you might have a high-traffic blog on your hands - Jeremy Raines

ⓞnor-notes.blogspot.com - Ginger Makela

@Ginger: I see that everywhere, not only in Sales… :( - Amit Patel

very cool...that is probably why friendfeed is ramping so smoothly and getting intelligent new features vs. another nameless service that is having severe growing pains. - Pokai

That's excellent hiring criteria -- would you hire them for your start-up. I know from experience that you can't really understand how important it is to work with A-players until you work at a company with mainly B-players. - Todd Nemet

I really prefer to work with @-players and ideally ?-players - ⓞnor

What about cos-players? - Jim Norris

And who is super-heroic dude? - Jim Norris

cos-players tend to be irrational unless you get exactly the right angle. - ⓞnor

Question: Why would one of these super-heroic programmers want to work for you rather than launching their own thing? - Adewale Oshineye

Dan should publish a blog with 100-word versions of all of Stevey's posts. I don't have the patience for the long versions. - Jeremy Hylton

I want high quality generic collaborative summarization in general. Not sure how it would work, it's really easy to warp and distort things when boiling them down, and way too easy to take cheap shots at the author (as I did above). - ⓞnor

Is that a bad thing? - j1m

ⓞnor, use a wiki. Also, i know an infinite number of rational cos-players. Take 60º for example. - John Lam