Sweet Jesus, it's been a long time since I updated this.  Judging by the total lack of emails or comments asking for new updates, I can safely conclude that it was indeed only my mother reading this.  Hi, Mom!  Happy Mother's Day!

Anyway, I felt that urge to spill my guts all over the internet and decided to do a bit of writing about my hero Paul Graham's fairly insulting essay, You Weren't Meant to Have a Boss.  Paul likens programmers working for actual bosses in companies larger than say, three, to caged and listless zoo animals, while he and his co-founders are the glorious lions romping about on the plains, living a life of danger and adventure.

Uh, sure.  Ok, Paul.  While I understand how you can (and often DO) advocate the life of a founder or co-founder since you were one, how can you begin to paint a picture of working in a large company?  I mean, have you ever worked in one of these "large" companies?  Yes, you co-founded Viaweb, and it sure was awesome.  Now you have this YC thing, and even more recently the increasingly popular founder/startup news forum, Hacker News.  And we all know the tales of horror and stupidity that arise from people working braindead jobs for huge companies.  Bosses that ignore your every suggestion, waste your time endlessly, and insult your intelligence with busy work and useless projects.  Bosses that micromanage and constantly pepper you with requests for the dreaded status report.

But, Paul, there are also magnificent bosses.  Bosses that encourage you to learn new technologies and methods, that send you to useful seminars and conferences, and that listen to what you have to say.  Bosses who wade into the trenches and code with you, and admit when they are wrong.  Best of all, bosses that respect your estimate of when a project will be completed and acknowledge that you probably know what you are talking about, since you wrote the damn thing. 

I've had both kinds of bosses.  The good kind are rarer, but they definitely exist.  Find one and work for her/him.  They are worth sticking with. 

And to extend your caged lion analogy a bit further, do you know what happens to a lion that is hurt or ill in a zoo?  A team of people step in to make him better, at great cost to themselves and little to the lion.  Enter the wonderful world of cheap health insurance, found in these "large" companies.

Now, this isn't a prefect analogy, of course.  All you glorious co-founders and dashing entrepreneur lions can certainly acquire a healthcare plan, though at greater cost.  But many founders seem to ignore the possibility that they may be injured and forge ahead putting every spare cent into their startup.  It certainly isn't cool or edgy to worry about health insurance, but when these super-cool founders need hospital help and have to sideline their startup (or even bail on it) to pay their hospital bills, they have ceased to be hunting lions.

Food for thought, Mr. Graham.



 
 

I decided I should probably give it a rest with the puns in the article titles.  A literary allusion is a nice title, though.  We do things with class around here, shitheads!

But on to the content.  As you may have gathered from my many posts which either center on Hacker News or mention it in passing, I am a big fan of the site.  During my usual meanderings and daydreamings about how awesome a pet dinosaur* would be and why it might not be too late for me to become an astronaut, I devoted some time to thinking about why I liked it so much.  It is, in case you are foolish enough to never click the orange text when reading my missives, a site run by Paul Graham concerning startups and other variegated things hackers like.  It began as a sort of offshoot of the Y Combinator startup program, which allots small investments to promising startups in batch mode every summer and winter, both in Boston and San Franciso, respectively.  Paul runs this as well, and has made a point to let people interested in funding know that registration on Hacker News is mandatory, and indeed, the quality of your comments and contributions has a direct effect on whether or not you will be funded.

This revelation has created an interesting culture, one that I wish existed in more places on the web, and that I will discuss in depth in a minute.  However, 99% of the forums online have no real interest in authentication of the poster's identity.  In fact, most forums rather expect you to come up with a username to protect your real identity.  But why? 

The most common answer is protection from identity theft.  But these days, what can someone do with just your name?  Track you down?  Unless you have a very uncommon name, it seems unlikely.  There are probably hundreds of Sean Spencers out there;** can someone really find my physical location without sifting through all these?  And why would they want to, unless I pissed someone off?

And here we come to a well-established point:  the internet + anonymity makes you an asshole.  When their is no penalty to your reputation for being a jackass (since no one can connect up your online username with your real name), people will just degenerate into stupid, vicious animals.

This is the difference between the discussions on Hacker News and those elsewhere.  Due to most posters on Hacker News having an established identity (many posters use their real names, like myself), the discussion quality is incredible.  People are literally climbing over each other to submit interesting stories and write insightful commentary.  This is why Hacker News is now my homepage, and why I wish more sites would adopt a similar policy of authentic identities.

* I am thinking maybe a stegosaurus.  I mean, I would need a bigger yard, but nothing beats riding around on a stegosaurus. 

** Lots of athletes, it seems.  If you find an athletic Sean Spencer online, it is a very safe bet that it isn't me.


 
 

Wait, that's AIDS.  Never mind.  Though annoying, ads are generally pretty harmless.  While reading Hacker News a while ago I began thinking about whether ads should exist on this stupid blog.  After several cups of coffee and some wasted thought imagining Scarlett Johansson nude, I finally came up with a solution:  targeted ads.  Enter Adpinion, an interesting idea with excellent implementation.

I like to support startups whenever possible, and the idea of Adpinion is worth supporting.  The basis of this innovation is that ads work best when they involve something a person cares about.  Tailoring ads to individual viewers is difficult for a site without cookies, but Adpinion not only allows me to see what various visitors of my site like, but also allows repeat visitors to view more relevant ads.

So how does this magical mystery work?  Adpinion uses a very simple and tried-and-true method:  voting.  If it serves an ad you dislike, click the thumbs down.  The ad will disappear until the page is refreshed and the site serves a new ad for you to vote on.  If you like the ad, click the thumbs up.  You'll see more like it in the future.

I decided to apply for a beta invitation, got it a few weeks later, and decided to try it out last week.  It will be interesting to see what (if anything) people vote up and down.

And I just put that picture of Scarlett up there to aid in my ruminations of her nude body while I wrote this.