His company is geared towards a clear mission which is very motivational to the engineers and managers in team. When a company drives towards a goal with a fanatical zeal, nothing else matters than achieving the milestones. Motivation towards achieving breakthrough achievements will mask the tendency which creates underperformance.

It would be wrong to compare it with any other traditional big company. The structures built around traditional big business work because of some reasons.

Once they achieve the goals of easier space flight and mission to mars and when it become easier or less motivational, probably they will face similar issues like most companies. But i don't this Musk cares a damn about that ... and he shouldn't

The good man was trying the opposite. Which is to make things as simple as possible for early students and get them do the hardest thing they will ever do: "solve some problems using these tools"

Instead of chasing after some title ("data scientist ..."), find ways of solving some useful problems with whatever you learnt. The article argues that becoming an expert is difficult, which may be true. But that does not mean you don't know enough to start digging at your problems in hand

"We usually advise startups to pick a growth rate they think they can hit, and then just try to hit it every week. The key word here is "just." If they decide to grow at 7% a week and they hit that number, they're successful for that week. There's nothing more they need to do. But if they don't hit it, they've failed in the only thing that mattered, and should be correspondingly alarmed."

This is the gem.

I'm curious if PG encourages a "discovery" stage where they don't have growth targets but rather are learning about the market/customer and building a product? And if so, how long of a "discovery" stage is encouraged?

The sixth footnote appears to address this a bit. You of course need to have something that could possibly grow before you can hope to achieve growth.

During Y Combinator we measure growth rate per week, partly because there is so little time before Demo Day, and partly because startups early on need frequent feedback from their users to tweak what they're doing. [6]

...

[6] This is, obviously, only for startups that have already launched or can launch during YC. A startup building a new database will probably not do that. On the other hand, launching something small and then using growth rate as evolutionary pressure is such a valuable technique that any company that could start this way probably should.

In other words, if a startup hasn't launched yet they quite sensibly don't measure growth rate--but it's a good idea to launch early so you can measure growth and optimize for it.

Another option is if you need time to build your product, you can launch another "something"... like the legendary mvp video from Dropbox or the finance blog from Mint.com they used to draw in signups several months before launching.

"should" be allowed OR is it "may" be allowed (if apple pleases).

Another technique could be to split the ranking into two modes, a general mode and a power mode(where rules are much strict and biased towards a filtered set of core community users). Using the power mode, readers would view the community core (who defines the site ethos) but may not be able to interact (vote,comment and submission not appearing here without upvote from core members).

Such an approach should be taken with a goal to gradually adhere the general user behavior towards the community core. May be add a tab for this.

The thinking is based on the premise that the site still has a lot of its core users and community values have not changed over time.

Basically a solution looking for a problem.

They are right, the complexity that big data caters for requires expertise at both technical and business level that would be costly (though may not be at infrastructure level). In the current economy, it looks even more difficult where businesses want to squeeze the maximum out of dollar investment.

IMO, its too early stage for big data solution adoption. However stage could be set for startups who can come up innovative solution that brings the cost level down together with simple and useful easy to grasp solutions.

congrats to guys. I subscribed some months back. Have been out of perl development since a year. This newsletter really helped to keep me updated. Infact i started re-looking again into cpan modules and filed a bug report recently for one of the modules. thanks again

"We have already shifted .., from physics to psychology as the value-driver and resource-allocator. "

While not agreeing to the article broadly, i agree to the statement above. Infact, i believe this is a desirable thing and we should see more of this in future. Past 200 years were about discovering the physics of things. The next 200 years would be about the discovering the working of "mind" which makes physics discoveries possible. Basically about neurological sciences , thought process , perception and more. This trend has barely started and we have a long way to go.

We may have a long way to go, but I don't think mind-science is being preferred just yet. I'd be surprised to find out we've ever had or are considering a $9bn project specifically to find out something narrow about the brain. (If you believe some people it will take about a quadrillion dollars to build a fully general AI but...) I also see no reason why it would take another 200 years from now to understand the brain at least as well as we currently understand fundamental physics. Especially since it's not like we're starting from scratch, and especially because science progress doesn't work so linearly.

>at night, over an ocean, in a storm, with no visibility, in possibly significant turbulance

Instead of finding out strategies on how to fly under these circumstances, why can't the plane change its course, if they anticipate the flying route to have these conditions. How about running some reconnaissance drones in the popular routes if they suspect a bad weather and want to check out. Or try out better weather monitoring methods and tools on these routes.

Edit : Ok my mistake.On reading again, the article states "Unlike other planes' crews flying through the region, AF447's flight crew has not changed the route to avoid the worst of the storms. ".

Not changing course like almost all other flight that night was their first mistake.

I noticed that the article suggested their weather radar was incorrectly set up, so that might be their first mistake.

They should have pay extra attention to the weather since this region of the globe is prone to the worst storm. They even aknowledge it in the recording.

1. This is a region that is quite regular with thunderstorms. The captain probably assumed this was like any other storm in this area any other day of the week.

2. This route is at the upperlimit this plane configuration can fly. If they had to reroute they would need to stop and refuel in another country, possibly Spain, Senegal or Morocco. I assume the captain didn't want to do this and soldiered ahead.

You simply don't fly through a thunderstorm, as you simply don't drive through A concrete wall at 100mph. No matter how short you are on fuel.

That was the first thing I noted in reading this.

Is there any discussion as to why they didn't seek an alternate plan and if not, is this something that needs to or has been remedied?

> Is there any discussion as to why they didn't seek an alternate plan

The Captain chose not to, because he "wasn't afraid of clouds" (see my comment above). This was a huge mistake.

But Captains are in charge of their route and it makes sense; it would be incredibly bureaucratic and dangerous if routes were decided from a central command somewhere at the airline headquarters...

What we need are humble pilots; there should be psychological evaluation to weed out those who think they are John Wayne hunting down Indians.

Part of the difficulty is that the job attracts daredevils -- among others: that night, all other Captains went around the storm...

Would the weather radar not being set up correctly have played a part in the reasoning of the captain?

Yes. Ask Stallman, Linus et al

Also all the old Bell Labs people who're now at Google. I'm sure Rob Pike could get more money than he does at Google if he wanted to go into the startup game, but he isn't interested.