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Linkdump for July 7th

by Rob Friesel
  • by Kevin M Hoffman (writing in .net magazine) – a good piece but I would add two other pieces of advice: [1] never underestimate the value of a clock or stopwatch (e.g., “You have five minutes to explain starting… now.”); and [2] structure the meeting so you can dismiss people as the meeting becomes irrelevant to them (or vice versa).
  • by Chuck Klosterman writing at Grantland (of which I am now totally enamored as a kind of “The New Yorker for the short attention span generation); this one is full of all sorts of little gems such as:

    [Popular Crime is] a fascinating, comprehensive, deeply strange book (it dissects crime literature as much as it dissects crime, sometimes seeming like the most intense 10th grade book report the world has ever seen).

    and:

    …in general, it’s reductive to think of evil as something foreign and separate from the rest of us. Evil is part of everyone.

  • David Brooks writing at NYTimes.com:

    The members of this movement have no economic theory worthy of the name. Economists have identified many factors that contribute to economic growth, ranging from the productivity of the work force to the share of private savings that is available for private investment. Tax levels matter, but they are far from the only or even the most important factor.

    But to members of this movement, tax levels are everything. Members of this tendency have taken a small piece of economic policy and turned it into a sacred fixation. They are willing to cut education and research to preserve tax expenditures. Manufacturing employment is cratering even as output rises, but members of this movement somehow believe such problems can be addressed so long as they continue to worship their idol.

  • Brett McLaughlin (at O’Reilly Radar) with an introduction to Node.js; trying to answer the questions “what is Node?” and “what’s it good for?” And at the end of all this, we have an idea of what it is, but we are (all of us) still struggling through the question of “what is it good for?” (Even if we think it’s pretty awesome.)
  • by Terry Bisson

About Rob Friesel

Software engineer by day. Science fiction writer by night. Weekend homebrewer, beer educator at Black Flannel, and Certified Cicerone. Author of The PhantomJS Cookbook and a short story in Please Do Not Remove. View all posts by Rob Friesel →

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