I have a lot of family in France, and based on what I've heard from them, the flip-side of those kinds of employment protections is that employers become much more reluctant to hire people (especially young people and people considered higher risk based on background, skills, etc.)
Possible that this attitude (along with many other factors) contributes to the far less developed startup cultures of many Western European countries.
Collecting miles isn't necessarily focused on earning free flights. The tiered statuses offered by most airlines include a variety of other perks that can make them attractive, and that couldn't readily be achieved via lowest-bidder flying: dedicated lines at airport security, advance boarding, free upgrades, free bags, waived fees, greater flexibility to change a ticket, dedicated customer support numbers, etc.
While some of these can be purchased as one-offs, the cost of doing so would probably offset the "cheapest flight" approach, and the convenience of receiving them automatically has some value on its own.
The cost/benefit might still not be there, but it's not as straightforward as the ticket savings vs. free flight savings question you put forward. You have to also bear in mind that many miles hunters are logging some (or most) of their travel on an employer's dime.
Still not disabled! Although at this point we're so habituated to PRs as a team that in practice it never happens. We did finally disable force pushes to master, though. Don't miss those one bit.
Yes, we're absolutely doing code reviews for each PR. Should have mentioned it in the post. Our general policy is to have engineers merge their own PRs, but only after at least 1-2 people have reviewed them (and obviously more for sensitive changes). The dialog that takes place in PRs helps enforce (and sometimes define) our style standards, teach engineers the idioms of a languages they may be new to, and ensure that we're always moving our codebase in the right direction. (They're also a great place to teach people how to write cleaner and less brittle tests!)
Like testing, PRs are one of those things that seems like it will slow you down, but once you learn how to use them they can actually increase velocity (among many other benefits). It's been awesome to watch how good people have gotten at collaborating/communicating via PRs at Airbnb.
Really appreciate this perspective. Reminds me of this quote from Steve Jobs:
"I'm trying to think of a good analogy. When we were an agrarian nation, all cars were trucks. But as people moved more towards urban centers, people started to get into cars. I think PCs are going to be like trucks. Less people will need them. And this transformation is going to make some people uneasy... because the PC has taken us a long way. They were amazing. But it changes. Vested interests are going to change. And, I think we've embarked on that change. Is it the iPad? Who knows? Will it be next year or five years? ... We like to talk about the post-PC era, but when it really starts to happen, it's uncomfortable."
This is so great. I submitted a ton of stuff despite having to type my username and email every time. Might be hard to scale, but there's definitely a lot of potential joy in this. Many of the winning words at the moment genuinely made me giggle.
I really dig the concept. Having seen the downsides of vagrant on a few projects, I'm definitely interested in the feasability of cloud-hosted dev environments. Virtualization on top of cloud servers could make this cheaper than running your own, and if you got clever you could probably setup shared services for SOA heavy architectures.
production: noun. 1 the action of making or manufacturing from components or raw materials, or the process of being so manufactured.
I'd say if you make a factory that takes raw materials and creates a series of one-off items, that you are engaging in production.
It seems like what you're really saying is, "this is not how production has been done in the past". With 3-D printing and related automation technologies, this will start to change very quickly. (It's already started, in fact).
I've thought about this, too. Certainly much communication on the modern internet is realtime, so arguably a protocol based on realtime communication makes more sense than a protocol conceived for asynchronous communication. A system that allows a conversation to move between the two seems ideal -- look at how Facebook collapsed the distinction between IMs and "messages". Trying to have a realtime conversation over email (even with a thread-aware, modern client like Gmail) is still an exercise in frustration.
The core support for the concept of presence in XMPP is also pretty compelling -- especially in remote collaboration settings, where transparency around another person's comings and goings can significantly reduce conversation friction.
That being said, the current XMPP protocol, even including the large set of approved protocol extensions, still falls very short of what would be needed for it to serve as a viable email replacement. As others in this thread have mentioned, the core protocol doesn't include any specification for how to handle messages directed to offline users, and while XEPs have been developed to address this, implementations still vary widely between implementations. Limited by the structure of JIDs, the protocol extension for multi-user chat ends up being a clumsy hack. It looks like there are also problems with large binary data transfer (see http://metajack.im/2008/06/10/binary-data-is-xmpps-achilles-...).
Obviously, a lot of these problems can be resolved with additional protocol extensions, but this risks creating a hodgepodge of conflicting standards and generating a menagerie of different implementations before drafts are settled on. The fact that the core XMPP RFC makes no allowance for offline messages, which is essentially the core of email, makes me think it might be unwise to try to hot-swap the two.
Several people have alluded to this outreach elsewhere in the thread. I'd certainly believe it. Any links/references on what these companies have offered?
Interesting point about public transportation -- by creating a private bus system, tech companies are actively suppressing demand for better public transport between SF and the valley.
One point nobody seems to have touched on: men should be just as pissed off about the "booth babe" thing as women. A company using this tactic is basically telling the straight men at a conference to think with their dicks, not their brains.
It's taking a product that could only exist through cultivating the higher functions of the human mind, and selling it by appealing to our basest lizard-brain instincts. It'd be like marketing a product by having two gladiators fighting to death in front of the booth. Impressive, but a step backwards for the species.
And yes, it's totally degrading to women as well. Even if the models involved were willing/wanted to participate.
I agree that it could have been phrased better (dorkitude's post seems to suggest a causal relationship) but I don't think that's what he was really saying.
As people have observed elsewhere in this thread, there's a natural human tendency for the privileged to underestimate their own privilege, and to overestimate the power of other groups. There are several comments in this thread that try to put the blame on women for not defending themselves more effectively, or even for contributing to the problem of sexism (see dizzystar's opening volley). This is flawed in the same way that it would be flawed to shout-down critiques of institutional racism by saying that minorities are as much to blame as white people. Of course there are sexist women and racist minorities. But they and their actions are not on an equal footing with those of the dominant holders of power in this country.
The fact is, in situations of social power imbalance, blaming the victim is an easy, shitty way to avoid addressing hard problems. The very defensiveness being displayed in this thread is further evidence that the members of this community need to calm down, look in the mirror, and consider their own privilege.
(And no, I'm not saying everyone in the HNN community is a straight, rich, white guy, but I think it's pretty clear we have a stilted demography).
I've been running into this problem while working through marketing docs/accelerator apps/etc. with a new startup. There's still a huge hole in collaborative document editing. Tools are either too simple to do this well (thinking of hackpad) or too complicated for quick uses (editing mode in word/comments in google docs).
An elegant solution for this kind of back-and-forth editing dialog on short-form copy would be huge. Surprised it doesn't exist already. And the concept of one-click "commits" is a powerful one for versioning -- makes it much easier to find things than google's atomic "save everything" version control.
Possible that this attitude (along with many other factors) contributes to the far less developed startup cultures of many Western European countries.