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Gervais / MacLeod 25: State- and truth-seekers, plus the emergence of the...
I started the Gervais / MacLeod series on February 19, 2013, and there’s one miss on my part that has been bugging me. Namely, I failed to flesh out the concept of the Technocrat except in moral terms....
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VC-istan is dead, not “the technical interview”
Don’t declare the death of the technical interview. If you make such a declaration, then I will declare with as much confidence (and more correctness) that you don’t know what the fuck you are talking...
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Here’s the proper way to evaluate a startup’s equity offerings
One thing that young people are very bad at– to their detriment, and VC-istan’s profit– is evaluating equity in a startup job offer. They don’t understand the numbers, what they mean, or the processes...
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Technology: we can change our leadership, or we can quit.
Technology has lost its “golden child” image, with piñatas of Google buses being beaten to shit in San Francisco, invasions of privacy making national headlines, and an overall sense in the country...
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Don Draper’s firing and Silicon Valley
Spoiler Warning: Stop here if you watch Mad Men and aren’t caught up. At the end of Season 6, Don Draper is fired, a move that many found surprising. One might argue that he has been “CTD” (circling...
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One fundamental difference between teachers and managers
I’ll just drop right into this with what that “fundamental difference” is. Among teachers, the demanding ones are often the best. Among managers, the demanding ones are usually the worst. I don’t...
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My name is cleared.
This came from a very high-ranking person at Google, earlier today. It is posted here with the author’s permission. Dear Michael, Your continuing outspokenness, with regard to your time at Google, has...
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What turns 99.999% of privileged people into fuckups
Generally, people who generalize are actually talking about themselves. I wouldn’t normally introduce myself as “a privileged fuckup”; however, I am more privileged than the average person in this...
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Three capitalisms: yeoman, corporate, and supercapitalism
I’m going to put forward the idea, here, that what we call capitalism in the United States is actually an awkward, loveless ménage à trois between three economic systems, each of which considers itself...
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Why your organization is intractably political, and how to fix it.
There’s a lot of advice out there on the Internet for corporate leaders on how to make their organizations less political. Everyone hates office politics; it’s all that shit that deprives an...
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Statistics, cooperation, politics, and programming.
Open: a simple dice “game” Let’s say that you’re playing a one-player “game”, where your payout (score) is determined according to the rolls of 101 dice. One of them is black and 100 are white, and...
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Gervais / MacLeod 26: r- and K-selection in organizations and capitalism.
I wrote about the three existing varieties of capitalism last month. Now I’m going to focus on a concept from evolutionary ecology, which is the r/K selection theory, pertaining to the tradeoff between...
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Why Clojure will win
I’m going to make a bold proclamation. I’m not going to claim that Clojure will ever become the most popular language, but it will win in the next 15 years in a major way, because it is already one of...
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How to unfuck performance reviews
In most companies, performance reviews are a ridiculous process that does orders of magnitude more harm than it does good. If they’re an inconsequential formality, they waste everyone’s time. If they...
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What really built Silicon Valley, and Baltimore’s surprising advantage.
I’m moving to Baltimore in less than a week. There’ll be a lot to say about that in the future, and on the whole, I’m pretty excited about the move. Right now, Baltimore’s not known as a technology...
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Why 0.999999… = 1. Also, bashing OOP.
This might be a step away from my usual blog fare, just to focus on something cool. Off and on, I enjoy studying logic. I spent a year in a math PhD program, before I was pulled away from it by Wall...
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Exploding college tuitions might be a terrifying sign
It’s well-known that college tuitions are rising at obscene rates, with the inflation-adjusted cost level having grown over 200 percent since the 1970s. Then there is the phenomenon of “dark tuition”,...
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Dimensionality– and also, a theory about the rarity of female programmers.
People have invented a number of theories regarding the relative lack of women in the software industries. I don’t intend to opine on each one of those theories. I’m pretty sure that it’s not a lack of...
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Ambition Against Humanity
One of the more interesting game design challenges is to combine two games. What would a mashup between Chess and Go look like? Or Magic: the Gathering versus Backgammon? How about Arimaa meets Oh...
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Breaking Bad finale review: truth sets a man free. [SPOILERS]
This review is written in some haste. Apologies for choppy writing. Breaking Bad‘s finale aired last night, and at first, it felt a bit incomplete. There weren’t many surprises. The machine gun really...
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