What I'm reading 3/21-3/28

2016-03-28

How America Can Create Jobs - Andy Grove

  1. "But what kind of a society are we going to have if it consists of highly paid people doing high-value-added work—and masses of unemployed?"

  2. "American companies discovered that they could have their manufacturing and even their engineering done more cheaply overseas. When they did so, margins improved. Management was happy, and so were stockholders. Growth continued, even more profitably. But the job machine began sputtering."

An Interview with Emmet Gowin (1998) - ASX

  1. "What we really need, we can't write the prescription for. You can't predict what it is you need to do. You just see each other, and you're interested. That's all."

  2. "The fact that something is unsayable, that you are emotionally restricted from saying or even recognizing consciously what your own spirit is struggling with, energizes one's work. That is exactly where good work comes from. And that's why you can't ask somebody to find out what it is they need to do."

My Year in Startup Hell at Hubspot - Dan Lyons

  1. "Arriving here feels like landing on some remote island where a bunch of people have been living for years, in isolation, making up their own rules and rituals and religion and language—even, to some extent, inventing their own reality."

  2. "How can you get hundreds of people to work in sales and marketing for the lowest possible wages? One way is to hire people who are right out of college and make work seem fun."

How to Get Out of Bed - Sadie Stein

  1. "The words danced before my eyes and I felt more alone than ever."

An Interview with Enrique Metinides: Death, Gore and Crying at Night - ASX

  1. "I laugh as he shows me a series of photographs of a beautiful young lady with long hair, dark eye makeup, and a go-go miniskirt and tall boots, first giving testimony to an investigator and then posing for Metinides' camera on top of a desk."

Why Markdown Sucks - Joe Armstrong

  1. "I am reluctant to say this, but there is a future proof way of making markdown - that's to write documents directly in XML with a strict DTD and then generate markdown from the XML - that way whatever incompatibilities the latest markdown de jour has to offer can be accommodated with a tweak to the code generator."

My dad killed himself when I was 13. He hid his depression. I won't hide mine. - Amy Marlow

  1. "So when I struggled with the wet-blanket sadness and gripping fear that characterize my depression and anxiety, I didn't tell my colleagues. I pushed myself harder and smiled even bigger. Like so many people who live with mental illness, you never would have known."

Insta-Declarative DSLs! - Ryan Brush

  1. "We need a simple way to write simple rules."

On the Perils of Dynamic Scope - Stuart Sierra

  1. "Remember that dynamic scope in Clojure is really thread-local binding."

  2. "Say goodbye to Agents, Futures, thread pools, non-blocking I/O, or any other kind of asynchrony. The resource is only valid on the current thread."