How do the people upvoting this read the article? Do they sign in? What possible benefit is there to signing in? They're basically holding content hostage.
When I defended Scribd, people came out in droves to point out how wrong it was to hold unique content hostage. I'll admit, it made me rethink my position. But it's strange to see that Quora doesn't get the same stick.
EDIT: If the HN homepage had a popup saying "Login with Google or Facebook to read all of HN," would you tolerate it?
https://www.quora.com/What-are-the-most-profound-life-lesson...
Still, I'm not a fan of this either.
That said, given my very public and vocal arguments against "walled gardens" in the past, why do I tolerate Quora? For the same reasons I tolerate G+, Facebook, etc. I annoys me and tickles a sore spot regarding the way I want things to be, but the value of the content is sufficient for me to "grin and bear it". But if there were a really good Quora alternative that was more open, I'd work to promote and support it. I don't know of one offhand though, especially considering network effects (that is, the value of Quora isn't the Quora software, it's the people posting and answering).
We can read them, by signing in.
> How do the people upvoting this read the article? Do they sign in?
Yes
> What possible benefit is there to signing in?
We get to read the article.
> If the HN homepage had a popup saying "Login with Google or Facebook to read all of HN," would you tolerate it?
Yes
Btw, dude, there's a close button.
For example, I just went into Incognito on another machine out of curiosity. I unclicked 'I am 13 or older' and then clicked on random grayed-out whitespace, and it showed the full article. Unless they kept my home IP from previous requests, but at that point, why bother with the age gate? Lawyers?
Not sure how anyone can defend this deceptive UX bullshit.
That's probably your problem. I signed up for Quora and can read the posts fine. Also, there's a 'close' link under that dialog, which you could have clicked without logging in.
> If the HN homepage had a popup saying "Login with Google or Facebook to read all of HN," would you tolerate it?
Yes. Why not? It seems childish to rail against this. If a site is useful, I create an account. I did that for HN, and it doesn't matter if the sign-in mechanism is proprietary, Google based, Facebook or OAuth. In fact, I trust sites that use external, federalised SSO more because I know they didn't roll their own authentication with associated failures.
"Before I came back to academia a couple of years ago I was out doing startups. What I noticed is that when people hire they are almost always hire based on experience. They're looking for somebody's resume trying to find the person who has already done the job they want them to do three times over. That's basically hiring based on Y-intercept.
Personally I don't think that's a very good way to hire. The people who are doing the same thing over and over again often get burnt out and typically the reason they're doing the same thing over and over again is they've maxed out. They can't do anything more than that. And, in fact, typically what happens when you level off is you level off slightly above your level of competence. So in fact you're not actually doing the current job all that well.
So what I would always hire on is based on aptitude, not on experience. You know, is this person ready to do the job? They may never have done it before and have no experience in this area, but are they a smart person who can figure things out? Are they a quick learner? And I've found that's a much better way to get really effective people."
4 years ago I did this, I did this last year, last month I tried my hand at this. However, it requires the interviewer to have the skill to extract this information during the interview and recognise the slope.
Concerning asking tricky question, you can do it the Google way ( How many frogs does it take to build a space elevator ) but even they decided to stop these kind of questions or take a lot of time and find something your candidate can work on, even if the technology is known to him, seeing how fast he can appropriate himself the codebase is really a good way to judge your future new recruit potential
> And if the Y-axis is something good, depending on your definition of something good, then I think most people would pick the red trajectory over the blue trajectory (..unless you think you're going to die before you get to the crossing point).
There was an article about it making the rounds a few days/weeks ago. A guy basically takes on a class of 30+ people for two days when hiring, teaches them something, then hires the one who did best. The rest are still happy to have learned something.
Another good approach might be flat out asking "Tell me about the last time you learned something new"
1. people we have worked with before who are known quantities i.e. smart AND good
2. people with minimal experience who we deemed to be smart after talking to them for a few hours
it's worked out well. to be deadly honest nobody else wanted to work for us.
Whoops—this fable is only true "eventually", if the slopes remain the same as t→∞.
I'm with the commenter (here) who said that real life is more likely to be an initial-value-dependent or path-dependent PDE. Someone else said having a high-IV person on your team will raise the slopes of everyone else which seems also right: the issues are multidimensional, not affine 1-D.
Ousterhout is taking sides (smarter > more experienced) which is fine; he can make that argument. But using y=mx+b as x→∞ doesn't count as an argument; it's rhetorical flair, not rhetorical substance. The substance of his reasoning seems to be "That's my opinion based on my experience in my past jobs".
If you're going to pick apart the math, we might as well pick apart that not everything can be modeled well as a linear function.
In the start-up period, though, aptitude is a better strategic choice in that you need people who can grow as quickly as the venture.
Later, you need the people with experience, even if they're a bit slow. They're the ones that have been bitten by the edge cases, the deadlocks, the XSS openings - and know to avoid them.
Do people really want their minimally-viable product to be full of deadlocks? I personally do not. And I don't want to hire promising but new-to-the-industry people who have to check stackoverflow to remember the difference between a pointer and a reference, or who spend hours trying to debug why something in their python program is iterating over a string.
Bottom line, I guess I don't see how anyone can want to bring in aptitude in the absence of experience. People with both would be fine, or a combination of both types of people would be fine. Aptitude without experience is not going to work.
Best professor I ever had.
When a developer forgets to test their code before pushing it to production, we often blame the developer. But the real problem is lack of automated testing, lack of processes, and too much responsibility for the developer.
With a good system in place, you hire people who have all the prerequisite knowledge (the languages, patterns, experience with similar solutions to the ones they'll do, and preferably good team spirit that matches your culture). The rest can be learned on the job. But once again, focus on your onboarding materials!
In short -- you should always look to be optimizing the system. THAT is your "slope" if you will. Except it's not a slope, it's an exponent! Because it builds on itself week after week. And you don't risk that one developer somewhere messing up your code.
We say: people live lives, companies create products.
However, in this moment, perfect as you are, you can still resolve to practice.
- Paraphrased from "The Practicing Mind"
