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  How to fire an employee who is not good enough?

It's always a tough decision to make to fire an employee. No matter he/she performs how bad, it's hard for the boss to say one person is fired. How to fire an employee who is not good enough? On Quora, there is one such question asked and we think one answer is very attractive and useful. The answer is given by Michael O. Church who is a New York functional programmer. The best employees are multipliers who make others more productive, and next are the adders (workhorses). Subtracters are the g...

   Fire,Career,Talent     2012-09-13 20:04:34

  Why Do Some People Learn Faster?

The physicist Niels Bohr once defined an expert as “a person who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field.” Bohr’s quip summarizes one of the essential lessons of learning, which is that people learn how to get it right by getting it wrong again and again. Education isn’t magic. Education is the wisdom wrung from failure. A new study, forthcoming in Psychological Science, and led by Jason Moser at Michigan State University, expands on this ...

   Learn,Speed,Reason,Analysis     2012-02-24 05:04:46

  Open Source (Almost) Everything

When Chris and I first started working on GitHub in late 2007, we split the work into two parts. Chris worked on the Rails app and I worked on Grit, the first ever Git bindings for Ruby. After six months of development, Grit had become complete enough to power GitHub during our public launch of the site and we were faced with an interesting question:Should we open source Grit or keep it proprietary?Keeping it private would provide a higher hurdle for competing Ruby-based Git hosting sites, givin...

   Open source,Benefits,Popularity,Advertisement,Advantage     2011-11-23 07:58:15

  Pinterest announces open registration

Pinterest is on-line for two years. During these two years, it gains big growth, but it needs invitation before you can register on Pinterest. Now Pinterest announces open registration, it means that anyone can register on Pinterest with emails, Facebook or Twitter accounts, no need to get invitation from others. In its official blog, Pinterest says: We’re really excited to have the capacity to offer Pinterest to more people and if you’re a Pinner with friends who’ve been wait...

   Pinterest,Social,Open registration     2012-08-09 01:56:23

  Check out Google Reader substitutes

It's only a few hours left that Google Reader will be shut down Since Google decides to decommission such a good product, many people are disappointed about Google. The gene of Google is completely different from Facebook, The strategy of promoting Google+ everywhere is becoming a bit offensive. As a heavy user of Google Reader, people have to start looking for an alternative, Below we give a comparison of different Google Reader substitutes. And we compare them with following parameters: Lload...

   RSS reader,Google Reader,Feedly     2013-06-30 08:46:42

  GitHub : Code is the most direct way for programmers to communicate

If not invested by Andreessen Horowitz, GitHub might not be noticed by Forbes, CNN, New York Times. People didn't know this tool because it was very far away from the world -- GitHub is a project hosting service used by programmers.But to some programmers, it is not just a place for project hosting, it is`also the hub for open source projects, a place for programmers improving themselves and a social network for programmers.There are around 3.26 million projects hosted on GitHub currently, inclu...

   GitHub,Open source,Hosting,Social     2012-07-20 11:38:31

  A serious security vulnerability found in MySQL/MariaDB

Recently a serious security vulnerability was found in MySQL/MariaDB. It relates to the access to the database. The issue is described below.When a user connects to MariaDB/MySQL, a token (SHA over a password and a random scramble string) is calculated and compared with the expected value. Because of incorrect casting, it might've happened that the token and the expected value were considered equal, even if the memcmp() returned a non-zero value. In this case MySQL/MariaDB would think that the p...

   MySQL,MariaDB,bug,fix,password,memcmp()     2012-06-11 10:28:09

  Why do C++ folks make things so complicated?

This morning Miroslav Bajtoš asked “Why do C++ folks make things so complicated?” in response to my article on regular expressions in C++. Other people asked similar questions yesterday. My response has two parts: Why I believe C++ libraries are often complicated.Why I don’t think it has to be that way. Why would someone be using C++ in the first place? Most likely because they need performance or fine-grained control that they cannot get somewhere else. A Ruby programmer...

   C++,Complicated,C++ PRogrammer,Design pattern     2011-12-31 15:45:39

  Google wins the lawsuit against Oracle

According to The Next Web, San Francisco court has made a final decision that Google didn't violate Oracle's Java patent. Although previously some judges and some people in jury said that Google made some mistakes on Java's use. The final decision made by the court saves Google from the charge of Java patent infringement. The next step of this lawsuit was supposed to be the evaluation of the damage and compensation. But now because of court's decision, this step is jumpe...

   Google,Oracle,Java,Anroid     2012-05-24 03:18:11

  Program Or Be Programmed

On Thursday night I gave a talk at NYU Poly and in the Q&A a young man asked me for advice for "those who aren't technical". I said he should try to get technical. The next morning I met with a bunch of Sloan Business School students doing a trek through NYC. A young woman asked me the same question. I gave her the same answer.I don't mean that everyone should become a software engineer. I do mean that everyone should understand software engineering (or whatever technical...

   Program,Technical,Basic knowledge     2011-11-10 10:31:02

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