jwz

1) the mission is great for living, but soma is better for getting work done (and closer to most things startup related)

2) if you find someone who lets you crash on their couch, go for it. give a few neighborhoods a try before you settle down! my first place that wasn't a friend's couch was a warehouse listed on airbnb. worked great and gave me the time to figure out where i really wanted to live.

3) it feels like people here are perpetually busy and barely have the time to hang out even with their closest friends. there's a seemingly endless supply of interesting people too. few strangers will throw a welcome party for you even if you are awesome (unlike where i am from). that makes people seem unwelcoming to a certain degree initially, but don't worry, it just takes a bit to grow into a social circle here and then you'll be perpetually busy and socially oversaturated too.

4) it's much easier to approach people when you have something to talk about. unless your project is in full gear, you might have an easier time getting to know interesting people through doing interesting things or sports. startup meetups and such work too, but being active together or even just picnicking together in dolores park gives you an entirely different connection. there's a lot of fun and cool stuff happening here that's not startup focused, and it's easy to join in and offer to help, and you'll be surprised how tightly connected this town really is.

5) a lot of people use hackerspaces as…

Max Chafkin is a little bit late to the party on this one. Here's an LA Times story with most of the same details:

http://articles.latimes.com/2009/feb/11/business/fi-lazarus11

I read it when JWZ pointed to it from his "I Hate Yelp" post:

http://jwz.livejournal.com/1002269.html

JWZ runs the DNA Lounge in San Francisco, and is "pretty sure" that he was in fact given a pay-to-play pitch for Yelp placement and review management.

For some very specific kinds of businesses --- the kinds unlikely to attract a constant stream of casual reviews --- Yelp has been useful to me. For restaurants and bars, it's less than worthless; "reviewers" clearly do make up random stories ("Publican serves O-Reida fries! Violet Hour serves well-liquor!").

In Chicago, we have LTH Forum. It is the polar opposite of Yelp. It is a PHPBB named after a specific Chicago Chinese restaurant that has completely owned up all the reputable food reviews in Chicago. It has no salespeople, makes no profit, is aggressively NOT SEO'd (LTH is never going to be the first hit for anything), appears to be layed out in PHPBB's default template, and is better than any other source of reviews in any city in the US. Every year it gives out awards (the LTH "Great Neighborhood Restaurants"), which --- again, this is a PHPBB site --- are hung in the windows of every restaurant that has received them.

You could never post a half-assed troll review on LTH and get anywhere with it. 15 people who'd been there and talked…

JWZ makes no sense what so ever. I'm sure he's really good at some kind of programming, or at least that he once was, but he often talks from what he thinks is a position of insight, while actually he's quite ignorant.

The first commenter's explanation of why OpenGL and OpenGLES differ is a fantastic example. JWZ simply never bothered to learn enough about the subject in the first place, but comfortably speaks about the "defining characteristics" of it.

Reminds me of a similar hubbub when he proclaimed that CSS is bullshit and decided to stick with table-based markup, this because CSS (in April of 2003), required a span inside of a h1 to replace his table-soup (to mark up just a headline), when he'd prefer just a h1. http://jwz.livejournal.com/193866.html

Being talented in programming is simply not a binary situation, which JWZ shows quite well: he might be really good at some things, I really don't know, but he is also really ignorant in some of the other things he rants about with confidence.

This is an interesting perspective; I took the opposite one. To me, the "duct-tape programmer" that Joel described was not a "duct-tape" programmer at all. He was just a programmer that knew the field and knew when and when not to apply certain languages and methodologies.

Certainly we'd all be happy to have jwz onboard our teams, but Joel holds him out as the one exception of a "good" duct-tape programmer. It's just really absurd. Joel's position seems to be "anyone that does not follow the dictates of the latest MEGA XTREME WATERFALL AGILE METHODOLOGY is going to do more damage than good", when really, like in almost everything else, the passing fads are merely empty promises hyped on to make consultants and specialists rich.

You may want to read jwz's response, I think it is fairly concise and good: http://jwz.livejournal.com/1096593.html

I rarely visit the Facebook site, and only then via a different browser than my main browser, which isn't logged in to Facebook, so it doesn't have the cookies etc. It is also ad-blocking the Facebook domains.

To get notified of interesting things happening, I subscribe to Facebook RSS feeds. JWZ made a listing of some of them here: http://jwz.livejournal.com/1144527.html About the only thing it doesn't include is photo updates.

With this setup, I visit Facebook perhaps once a week.

Is WebOS honestly that good? The last I heard that I was paying attention to was jwz giving up on his for performance reasons (http://jwz.livejournal.com/1108212.html)

I know there's a lot to like about it; I loved (in my brief exposure) the cards metaphor, and I imagine that development could be quite nice, but have they solved the issues he refers to?

[disclaimer: I have had a brief play with a Pre, but you can't get them in Australia. I would have considered getting one].