Havoc's Blog

Haven’t had time to blog in months …

• Have been working on litl during nearly
  all available hours… it took some time (doesn’t it always?) but we
  have a great team assembled and it’s a ton of fun to focus on writing
  the code rather than hiring, and see the rapid progress a complete
  team is able to make. (If you want to pile on, we aren’t urgently
  hiring, but we probably will be at some point especially for the right
  person, so we’d love to see your resume.)
• There is nothing better than getting high-quality work done with a
  high-quality group of people.
• Clutter is rapidly
  approaching 1.0 … spent some time this weekend patching
  the
  remaining issue that was driving me crazy, hoping to
  get it in under the wire. Emmanuele may be owed beers.
• It’s gratifying that the new default home screen of Facebook looks a lot
  like Mugshot.org,
  a site some of us came up with at Red Hat.
  We coded Mugshot’s personal-lifestream-thingy before Facebook’s news feed came
  out and before FriendFeed came out. Not saying either site copied
  us, but it’s still nice to know at least our idea was good (even
  though there were lots of reasons we weren’t the ones to get anywhere
  with it).
• It used to be that the cool kids claimed to have listened to
  R.E.M. before Document
  (these are cool kids 20 years ago, I guess). I was listening to
  mutual fund manager John Hussman before
  he showed up on fivethirtyeight.com
  and in the Wall
  Street Journal. Am I a cool kid? Ha.
• New
  York Times tries to explain why people get distracted by small(er)
  things like millions in AIG bonuses, while missing large things, like
  billions to bail out AIG’s
  bondholders. Possible Occam’s razor answer: most people don’t know
  what a bond is, but they know what a bonus is.
• Some spammer selling Hewlett-Packard products took over my Twitter
  account “hp”, and now Twitter seems to have deleted it – and allowed
  someone else to grab the account. I emailed Twitter a while back
  asking them to fix it but all I got was an autoresponse saying “we’ve
  taken two weeks and still haven’t gotten back to you, let us know if
  you still need help.” I rarely twittered anything anyway, but
  … lame.
• Funniest thing today was a random snark on Ayn
  Rand that Miguel
  reposted.
• Why is it reasonable to pretend that socialist or libertarian
  principles can guide a decision between 35% and 39.6% tax rates?
  Sure, 5% vs. 80% is an ideological debate. But 35% vs. 39.6% is a
  pragmatic debate. The vast majority of American voters agree on the
  main government spending items – social security, medicare, defense –
  that eat up most of our tax revenues. Controversial spending items
  are too small to affect the tax rate much. And the vast majority of
  Americans are opposed to 50-60% tax rates. We’re going to stay right
  about where we are because big tax hikes and big spending cuts are
  both third rails. Here’s
  some historical perspective; tax rates are much more
  stable over the last few decades than they have been over the last century.
• Amy discovered Cake
  Wrecks (scroll past Sunday, they have non-wrecks on
  Sunday). Awesome.

(This post was originally found at http://log.ometer.com/2009-03.html#22)