Kragen Javier Sitaker

FWIW I think "Why I do not want to work at Google" originally composed in HN thread http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2728174

These older posts are also fun http://lists.canonical.org/pipermail/kragen-tol/1999-January/000322.html http://lists.canonical.org/pipermail/kragen-tol/2006-November/000841.html

Doing many things, including filtering spam, is more difficult in a decentralized environment. (It is curious that email, itself decentralized, has come to be dominated by several large service providers; I wonder how much of this is due to economies of scale for fighting spam and other attacks relative to other economies of scale relative to things not characterizable as an economy of scale? Search of documents published in a decentralized manner on the web is another example.) Many things are even easier in a completely centralized manner, thus G+, Facebook, Twitter, and their morbid predecessors. For all their issues, architecturally decentralized email, web, and internet are much more valuable than the 2011 versions of AOL, CompuServe, and Prodigy silos. So thank you to all working on making the next bits of decentralized architecture work. I imagine it is possible to do a bit of this work at Google et al, but it is clearly way, way down the priority list of any such companies.

I don't really have an opinion to state on the actual discussion at hand, but I figured I'd toss in an old link which contains what some of "those" might be:

http://lists.canonical.org/pipermail/kragen-tol/2007-March/000849.html

Javier Kragen Sitaker's article/mail "My Evolution as a Programmer", recounts one coder's his growth as a programmer, career, and exposure to a variety of books throughout. It's really an excellent read, and contains some comparisons between a few good books - particularly Code Complete and The Pracice of Programming. I quote,

During this time, I read "The Practice of Programming", which is a lot like "Code Complete", but shorter and much higher in quality. I had read the same authors' "The Elements of Programming Style" back in 1995, on much the same subjects, but that book is nearly unreadable today --- it's written in PL/1 and FORTRAN IV. TPoP, aside from being written with modern programming languages, also contains insights from several decades more of the authors' experience.

-- The author in question is Brian Kernighan. Anyrate, I leave any interested person to go check the article out, if you haven't seen it already.

Network effects tend to be substantially overestimated. For instance Metcalfe's law is widely cited, but more careful analysis of actual behavior suggests that n*log(n) tends to be a better scaling estimate than n^2.

Moving on, be careful about moving to a sales force driven strategy. When you're selling with a sales force you have to cover the overhead of an expensive sales process. This is one of the big reasons why a lot of software is priced low enough that someone can pay for it with a credit card, and lots of software priced over $50,000 but very little between those two numbers. Also once you go down the enterprise software route the quality of your sales process matters more than the quality of your software. A good read on that is http://lists.canonical.org/pipermail/kragen-tol/2005-April/000772.html.

I'm not saying that this is a bad strategic move or the wrong strategy for your company. But you should be aware of the consequences.

Who needs the government since we have mathematics?

Also discussed on a canonical mailing list here http://lists.canonical.org/pipermail/kragen-tol/2005-June/000783.html

"In the form he described in his paper, a dominant assurance contract is a contract offered by an escrow agent to members of the public; it is of the form, "In exchange for my payment of $S, if K or more people donate $S to this same cause, the escrow agent will create public good X (at cost $C), and keep all the donated money. If fewer than K people donate $S, the escrow agent will return $S + $F to each of the donors and will not create the public good."

Edit: Designing a mechanism that works for new unproven products, too, is left as an excercise for the reader.

Here's what I thought of Reddit in 2008: "merely a collection of trivia, narrow, shallow, and sensational".

http://lists.canonical.org/pipermail/kragen-tol/2008-January/000878.html

Since then I've become a Reddit user, but my opinion hasn't changed much. The bottom line from that post:

"The pathological focus on recency in Digg and Reddit's setup, and to a
slightly less problematic extent in del's, has some benefits. It
engages people in dialogue, and it's ideal for things like organizing
political protests. It's great if you want to stay on top of things.
But I think it's more important to get to the bottom of things."

Google first approached me in 2010. Here is the relevant part of my otherwise short reply:

Google follows what I believe to be unethical business practices – including, but not limited to, condoning censorship, invading their users’ privacy, [publishing] proprietary software, and making available and encouraging the use of network services with far too little user control of the programs.

A little more than a year later, Kragen Javier Sitaker wrote this, which I thought was the best explanation of why one wouldn’t want to work for Google:

http://lists.canonical.org/pipermail/kragen-tol/2011-August/000938.html