Brent's

You know what’s great about New York? The threshold for citizenship as a New Yorker is actually pretty short. Like, if you come to New York and you still like it two years after you arrive here and you still think its great and you’re having a good time and you haven’t been totally ground down and go limping back to wherever the fuck you came from…you know what? You’re in.

For great is the power of arguing and the faculty of persuasion, and particularly if it should be much exercised, and also receive additional ornament from language: and so universally, every faculty acquired by the uninstructed and weak brings with it the danger of these persons being elated and inflated by it. For by what means could one persuade a young man who excels in these matters that he ought not to become an appendage to them, but to make them an appendage to himself? Does he not trample on all such reasons, and strut before us elated and inflated, not enduring that any man should reprove him and remind him of what he has neglected and to what he has turned aside?

For 30 years now, he has lived a monkishly regimented life, each facet of which has been precisely engineered to help him produce his work. He runs or swims long distances almost every day, eats a healthful diet, goes to bed around 9 p.m. and wakes up, without an alarm, around 4 a.m. — at which point he goes straight to his desk for five to six hours of concentrated writing. (Sometimes he wakes up as early as 2.) He thinks of his office, he told me, as a place of confinement — “but voluntary confinement, happy confinement.

…inspections are a cheaper method of finding bugs than testing; according to Basili and Selby (1987), code reading detected 80 percent more faults per hour than testing, even when testing programmers on code that contained zero comments. This went against the intuition of the professional programmers, which was that structural testing would be the most efficient method.

What’s the potential power of the entrepreneur’s simple leap of faith? The success of a single business has a significant payoff for the economy. Looking back over the 25 years since our company went public, Schwab has collectively generated $68 billion in revenue and $11 billion in earnings. We’ve paid $28 billion in compensation and benefits, created more than 50,000 jobs, and paid more than $6 billion in aggregate taxes.

Dr Bartels and Dr Pizarro then correlated the results from the trolleyology [studying ethics using contrived life-or-death scenarios] with those from the personality tests. They found a strong link between utilitarian answers to moral dilemmas… and personalities that were psychopathic, Machiavellian or tended to view life as meaningless. Utilitarians, this suggests, may add to the sum of human happiness, but they are not very happy people themselves.

According to Global Trade Alert, a database of restrictions on international commerce, Argentina now imposes more trade limitations deemed “harmful” than any country save Russia

Outsider, non-founder CEOs are often overvalued because many corporate boards think the answer to their problems is a superstar CEO with an outsized reputation. This leads them to overpay for people who are good at creating outsized reputations through networking, interviewing, and taking credit for other peoples’ achievements—all bad indicators of future success.

Foursquare uses Scala’s difficulty as a filtering mechanism. You’ve gotta be good enough to be able to learn Scala to succeed at Foursquare.

The only person with the credibility to helm Apple in the long run is a person who can do [design] critiques. And for all Cook’s brilliance, I’ve seen no evidence he’s a master of great taste. His creativity is at achieving a predetermined goal, not about deciding what goal to achieve.

…Heroku is a polyglot platform. Techniques for deployment, logging, and scaling are applicable to all app deployments, regardless of language. A common deployment infrastructure reduces language choice to just a question of syntax and libraries. Reduced coupling between app and infrastructure enables picking the right language for each job.

For six generations, the same family has run Hermès. That has given this company something no other company has. Our combat with LVMH is not an economic fight, it’s a cultural fight. We try to do poetry and we get excellent economic results. We must protect that.

German-style games avoid direct conflict. Violence in particular is taboo in Germany’s gaming culture, a holdover from decades of post-World War II soul-searching. In fact, when Parker Brothers tried to introduce Risk there in 1982, the government threatened to ban it on the grounds that it might encourage imperialist and militaristic impulses in the nation’s youth. (The German rules for Risk were hastily rewritten so players could “liberate” their opponents’ territories, and censors let it slide.)