TL;DR: bing SSL certificate is wrong.

https://bing.com: subject=/CN=*.bing.com

https://www.bing.com: subject=/C=US/O=Akamai Technologies, Inc./CN=a248.e.akamai.net

I'm often frustrated at folks who take the wrong lesson from Steve Jobs.

As this piece describes, they look at the dude and take away that they should be jerks because that's how things get done. And that's a terrible lesson.

In my read, as a guy who's been following Apple since he was a kid, there's one principal lesson for leaders and entrepreneurs:

If you care about making exactly what you want, make sure you're the boss.

That's it. You can define the agenda, you can get the right people, you can motivate them according to your style. You get to win all the design arguments. You get to slip the deadlines for quality.

You can definitely be a jerk in that context, but you don't have to.

> _why was the first person to actually create art around and about software.

That's complete rubbish. But it probably is correct that he was the first person that created art around and about software that you are aware of.

Quote: "Even Steve Jobs wasn't Steve Jobs initially. He only outed himself as a giant jerk after he had a company that could afford to have a huge turnover, and he had a pile of minions that hero-worshiped him no matter what he did."

This isn't true. I knew Steve when he and Steve Wozniak were starting Apple, in the late 1970s, and he (Jobs) was always intolerable -- it wasn't something that came out after he acquired power. I couldn't stand working with him, so, even though people at Apple asked me to stay, I wouldn't. (I eventually worked with Apple on various software projects, but not at Apple.)

Steve Jobs had the worst interpersonal dynamics of anyone I have ever met. All that proves is that being perpetually rude and having terrible people skills isn't a deal-breaker in corporate America.

I emailed _why once, asking him how I should cite his name in a highschool project I was working on. Here is his response:

  You can use my name (why the lucky stiff) and the date of
  publication (feb 16, 2004 - present) as frequently in your
  studies as you wish, so long as you keep your grade point
  average up and you diversify your elective credits with a
  broad portfolio of subjects.  I am specifically hoping you
  will bask in the study of 1930s Russian absurdist
  literature.  Oberiu is the name of the movement.

  I will never forget you.

Everything made sense after that, and the absurdist part of my world lit class that year.

A similar phenomenon makes it dangerous to sleep without proper ventilation:

>It is important that crew accommodations be well ventilated; otherwise, astronauts can wake up oxygen-deprived and gasping for air, because a bubble of their own exhaled carbon dioxide has formed around their heads.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Space_Station#Cre...

It is easy to see _why as "the crazy ruby guy who wrote some scripts and created all this drama around his persona". Even though _why did indeed write some (very useful) programs, I think this view of him misses the point and probably explains why so many people seem to be puzzled by his newest endeavour.

Yes, he wrote some Ruby code, but the code was his least important contribution.

_why was the first person to actually create art around and about software. Others before him have used software as a tool in their artistic process, but to my knowledge no one has ever taken coding as the subject of a performance art so intricate and beautiful as the character whytheluckystiff. All his scripts, all his writings, even all his quirky animations and songs show a love and passion for coding as a recreational activity that defies our conventional beliefs about software as a craft & industry.

We often hear people in this community talk about elegant code, beautiful code, even code as art. But all these sentiments usually mean art in the form of craftsmanship: We want a shorter way to write the same web app, a more expressive way to create our tests, a more concise DSL for data manipulation. While all of these are worthy goals, they are only a tiny, tiny fraction of what coding really is or at least could be. If something doesn't help us build our MVP faster, it's useless to us. Isn't there more to software than that? Sure, there are people focusing on more esoteric stuff in their free time, writing their own Lisps, exploring different data structures, etc. But all of these activities still follow the same tenets: More efficient is better, smaller is better, better is beautiful. We are in love with perfection and purity, because that is what we (necessarily) strive for in our daily work.

_why was different.

Similar to how the decadent and symbolist movements of the late 19th century popularized "Art for Art's sake", _why devoted his whole opus to "Code for Code's sake". His work as a "freelancer professor" showed how much he cared about children learning programming as an enjoyable activity, not as a way to increase the supply of professional programmers. He also satirized our obsession with exactly this professionalism that tends to creep into our thinking and permeates our culture. In short, he used his character to show us aspects of software that were largely underrepresented or ignored in most mainstream discussions.

Personally, reading the poignant guide was the first time I read a piece of code not to understand the code, but to understand a wonderful story. I still don't know how to program in Ruby, but that doesn't matter. In my opinion the poignant guide never really was about Ruby. It was a wonderfully quirky book that happened to be using Ruby as its language. _why's style is absolutely unique and reflects his approach to coding: It doesn't have to be (what we normally consider) beautiful or clean, but it nevertheless forms a great and intricate experience for the reader.

Similarly, today was the first time that I regretted not owning a printer. To see new pages suddenly arrive in the tray to form a crazy and beautiful story must have been magical. Even using only a virtual printer it was wonderful to read the new parts of the book as they arrived and this experience alone made it worthwhile for me. The content itself deserves more than just this quick HN comment though.

So, if you want to know why so many people seem to enjoy the works of _why, set aside some time and start to dig through his estate of old stuff. Don't try to find something useful, just let the whole strange collection sink in. As is often the case with art, the subjective experience is hard to put into words as it depends so much on your personal context and the context of the artwork. I have definitely done a shoddy job trying to describe what makes _why special for me, I am not even sure it can be adequately put into words. But if you like things that are absurd, sometimes useless, yet strangely beautiful, then take a closer look at this works.

Thank you for everything, _why.

--

A friend asked me to post this for him.

>The shift in policy affects roughly 200 of Yahoo's 12,000 employees.

I see this statistic and I'm reminded at how much of a disingenuous uproar the policy change caused. Every time I read comments regarding this issue I'm more convinced the real issue is who issued the policy, and not the change itself.

A new mother canceling work at home while simultaneously raising her own child in the office is not hypocritical. It supports her position. And yes, a private nursery is a perk she receives as CEO.

A CEO gets a nursery: Outrage! CEO gets a private bathroom, private airplane, private car, meetings on the golf course, etc: normal operating procedure. I wonder why the nursery gets singled out for ridicule?

This is simultaneously one of the most ridiculous and most awesome things I've seen.

You have fought the hydra bravely, and I commend you for that. May the road rise up to meet you. May the wind be always at your back.

What do you suppose we do?

For the long-term, here's the financial structure for the solution that I see: http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2013/03/26/gervais-macle... . Essentially, I think VC-istan and MegaCorps are both dead ends when it comes to genuine technical excellence (which weird people like us care about). I think it's time to have a serious conversation about financing a fleet of mid-growth K-strategist startups instead of these red-ocean, r-strategist, get-big-or-die marketing gambits.

Here's an insane thought that I had that just might work. Find a Midwestern city that has $25 million to blow on becoming a top technology hub and set up an Autonomy Fund. (I'll do the "grunt work" of screening for talent; if this idea has legs I'd drop everything to implement it.) 100 top-notch programmers, $125k per year (out of which their resource/AWS costs come, so no one's living high on the hog), and 2 years. First, these companies are designed to become profitable, not to exit, so compensation is profit-sharing, not the joke equity offered by VC-istan. The city that funds this takes a 37.5% profit-share of whatever they build (it's valuating their work at $333k per year, which is lower than a VC valuation, but the terms are better.) If it works, then add time to the schedule (i.e. more years of life and more startups) and possibly more engineers. This is like Y Combinator, but without the feeder-into-VC dynamic; it's to build real businesses that generating lasting value both to a geographical area and to technology itself.

I seriously think that Autonomy Funds are going to be big in the next 10 years-- VC-istan is essentially a shitty implementation of an Autonomy Fund, except with selection based on connections rather than technical ability-- but there are some obvious problems (moral hazard, principal-agent issues) that need to be solved.