“From the beginning Noyce gave all the engineers and most of the office workers stock options. He had learned at Fairchild that in a business so dependent upon research, stock options were a more powerful incentive than profit sharing. People sharing profits naturally wanted to concentrate on products that were already profitable rather than plunge into avant-garde research that would not pay off in the short run even if it were successful. But people with stock options lived for research breakthroughs. The news would send a semiconductor company’s stock up immediately, regardless of profits.”
—The Tinkerings of Robert Noyce
May 2013
12 posts
“Relevant to the Executive archetype is the engineer-manager impedance mismatch. As a software programmer, I’m routinely told by my “subordinate” (the compiler) that I fucked up at my job. Over minor typos, the machine yells back at me, “Fix your shit or I’m not doing anything.” It simply won’t do anything if I give it nonsensical instructions. It’s frustrating! But it’s also a part of how I see the world. I like blunt feedback. Loud failure draws attention and I can fix it. Silent failure is the worst. Executives don’t think this way. If they hand down nonsensical or conflicting requirements, your job is to “make it work anyway”, not push back (like a machine) until their instructions make sense. If you push back against a bad instruction (in the way that a compiler would, and we like that) he can’t separate (a) your concerns about the decision, which may have been horrible, and (b) his perception that your objection is a slight against him and his ability to lead. Programmers get regular feedback about mistakes they made; executives never do. That’s why they’re so much more arrogant than we our, despite our reputation.”
—Gervais / MacLeod 23: Managers, mentors, executives, cops, and thugs | Michael O. Church
“As cities also start to look back at historical data, fascinating discoveries are being made. Mike Flowers, the chief analytics officer in New York, says that if a property has a tax lien on it there is a ninefold increase in the chance of a catastrophic fire there. And businesses that have broken licensing rules are far more likely to be selling cigarettes smuggled into the city in order to avoid paying local taxes. Over in Chicago, the city knows with mathematical precision that when it gets calls complaining about rubbish bins in certain areas, a rat problem will follow a week later.”
—Cities and data: By the numbers | The Economist
March 2013
9 posts
“I believe in InnoDB the way text and varchar(X) is stored is exactly the same. They both only use as much space as the data they are storing requires. However if you pass a 101 character string to a varchar(100) it will be truncated. I’d guess that is useful in some cases, but in reality you probably want to do the truncation in your application so you have more control over it.”
—I believe in InnoDB the way text and varchar(X) is stored is exactly the same. T… | Hacker News
“Startups that have a credible potential to be sold or go public for a 10x gain on invested capital within 4 to 6 years of the date of funding should consider raising venture capital.”
—The truth about venture capitalists, Part 1 - pmarca ARCHIVE
